Re: Orca Launching in Edgy -- continued

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Peter Korn wrote:
> Hi Henrik,
>
> Thanks for your thoughts and efforts here.  When it comes to keystroke 
> gestures, may I direct your (and everyone else's) attention to the 
> System Administration Section of the GNOME 2.14 Accessibility Guide (at 
> http://www.gnome.org/learn/access-guide/2.14/sysadmin-27.html)?  There 
> we define gestures for GDM to invoke AT.  E.g Ctrl-M held for 1 second 
> to invoke the magnifier; a particular mouse movement pattern to start 
> the on-screen keyboard in dwell mode.  These gestures have gone through 
> some user testing, could use more user testing and feedback, and 
> illustrate some of the wide capabilities of the gdm gesture listener 
> architecture.
>   

Hi Peter,

OK, I agree with you in part ;) I feel that if we are seeking to 'do it 
right' we should think about a wider range of scenarios.

I think making GDM accessible through gestures is important and will be 
useful in many cases. But I also think that we should work toward using 
gestures on the default desktop as well. There are several situations 
where the GDM does not get used but starting the access tools is still 
useful:

* Live CDs
* A public computer set up in Kiosk mode
* A home computer set up with a single log-in without a log-in prompt 
where more than one person uses the computer.
* Possible future mobile devices that uses core parts of gnome but not GDM

I am slightly worried that we focus too much on GDM because AT-SPI does 
not load dynamically. As far as I can see that is simply a bug that 
should be fixed. It may be that fixing it will involve touching every 
part of Gnome or even the kernel and that it's not doable until Gnome 
3.0. Even so I think we should have it on our radar already now.

If you use a screen reader you should be able to activate the reader in 
the middle of a session using the same keystrokes as you would when 
logging in. That way you don't even have to know what state the machine 
is in (it might be some random public terminal). The gestures should be 
universal to all machines and ideally installed and active by default.

So we are talking about default desktops here which will always create 
worry and controversy. I think there are several steps we can take to 
move gradually in this direction though so that we get buy-in from the 
rest of the community:

* GDM is a good early target in this regard because gestures there are 
less likely to get in other people's way.
* A separate daemon, xorg extension or kernel module can be prepared 
that does what we need. This can be tested and proven before we try to 
push it on a wider community.
* The above tool or collection of tools could be prepared as a separate 
package that could be installed optionally. -- and at some point we 
convince some renegade distro to install it by default ;)
* A well designed dialog should be included that appears the first time 
a gesture is used on the desktop with: [Yes, I want to use gestures] 
[Don't listen for gestures on this user account again] [More 
information] -- If someone is annoyed by the feature they can make it go 
away forever
* We don't have to wait for AT-SPI to be dynamically loadable. We can 
prepare this gesture tool to do as best it can (ie. enable AT-SPI and 
suggest logging out). It will still make life easier for people without 
that (as Al points out).

- Henrik

ps. I've moved this to the gnome list since it's quite general.