Re: Gnopernicus Sending Output to Serial Device Crashes Hardware Synthesizer

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Kenny said (of checking the br_active gconf key:

> For the record: I configured my console screan reader to use software speech
> through speech-dispatcher or I couldn't run this test.
>  
You don't have to be running GNOME's gui in order to run gconftool-2.  I 
would have thought that power-cycling your synth would have sufficed.

As for the dialog in question - it's not just intended for blind people, 
it's there for gui-centric testers, admins, and setup folks too. 

While this may not be true of sysadmins, in general users of hardware 
synths are in the minority.  Certainly we want to try to coexist with 
hardware synths, so we wish to fix this bug, but I don't think we want 
to discard gnopernicus' current ability to talk to braille devices in 
its default configuration. 

Not all end-users will have console access, or be familiar with it, so 
various bootstrapping problems remain.  The reason for the dialog is to 
make it possible (and easy) for users to have immediate access to their 
gui on login, without having to manually start gnopernicus at each 
login, without feedback.   What works well for some users will cause 
problem for others, and early adopters like yourself help us find those 
problems.

It would be nice to have reliable plug-and-play of hardware devices for 
accessibility, but we don't have the necessary capability yet, 
especially with older devices.  And even a hardware probe could have 
caused a problem for the DECTalk, it seems.

Command-line configuration has a number of drawbacks.  While you _can_ 
use the command line to temporarily set some gnopernicus options, gconf 
is the preferred mechanism because it is persistent and does not require 
applications to be launched from consoles or scripts; in the GUI 
environment, most are not.

- Bill

> It's my view that an access technology shouldn't assume anything about a
> hardware device existing on a port unless it has been told so by a
> command line option.  Gnopernicus deciding to enable braille support and
> assuming a braille display is connected to /dev/ttyS0 is like a program
> deciding to break a sighted person's moniter.
> What's even worse about this behavior, is a blind person will already be
> running gnopernicus before they can access this dialog.  This dialog
> shouldn't make changes to gnopernicus's config if Gnopernicus is already
> running.
>
>          Kenny
> 	  
>
>
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> End of gnome-accessibility-list Digest, Vol 10, Issue 15
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