Feature Proposal: Accessibility on by default

[Piñeiro <apinheiro igalia com>]

Description
===============

GNOME 3.4 shows improvement in theaccessibility stack:in performance,
stability and support of coreapplications like GNOME Shell [1][2].
Although part of this work consisted ofimprovingthe integration of the
accessibility support withinthe toolkits (e.g. no more gail, but ATK
implemention inGTK+), the accessibility framework isstill relying on
plugin loading based on the 'accessibility-toolkit' gsetting value.

During the last ATK/AT-SPI2 hackfest, wediscussed that the next step
would go a step further:  'accessibility-toolkit' would disappear,
plugins would also disappear, and the accessibility support would be a
integral part of GNOME toolkits and applications. As a result,
accessibility support would receive more attention, both on runtime and
on compile time, and more feedback would be received [3].

Although the hackfest answered some questionsabout how to proceed, there
are others which remain. For instance, we want to dropthe atk-bridge
loading, but we still need to decide how to accomplish this. And there
are other issues that would require our attention first, such
aseliminating the need fortoolkits to emit the key events (keysnooping).

So after a thread on gnome-accessibility-devel [5] and some chat on IRC,
we think that for the moment it would be better to propose a
compromise:just switch the default value of 'toolkit-accessibility" to
true, in other wordsthe accessibility support would beon by default.
While a small change in terms of a "feature," it would result in more
runtime testing (and feedback) for this cycle while we work on the
unanswered questions for the next cycle. In the same way, if something
goes wrong (like core app X crashing constantly and no solution), it
would be easy to revert the changeprior to the end of the cycle.


Implementation
===============

The change is trivial. It is only required to change the default value
of 'toolkit-accessibility' on
org.gnome.desktop.interface.gschema.xml.in.in. A one-liner patch.


Owner
=====

Alejandro Piñeiro and gsettings-desktop-schemas maintainer (to review
the patch)


Involved parties
================

Accessibility team


Current Status
===============

'toolkit-accessibility' default value is 'false'


References
==========

[1] http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2012/03/27/tomorrows-gnome/
[2]
http://blogs.igalia.com/apinheiro/2012/03/30/gnome-3-4-finally-orcagnome3/
[3]
http://blogs.igalia.com/apinheiro/2012/01/24/atkat-spi2-hackfest-2012-days-2345/
[4]
http://blogs.igalia.com/apinheiro/2012/01/24/atkat-spi2-hackfest-2012-days-2345/
[5]
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-accessibility-devel/2012-April/msg00008.html

-- 
Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias