Re: GDM accessibility sans AT-SPI

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Brian Cameron wrote:
> I suppose it might be possible to code an on-screen keyboard directly
> into GDM, but this might be more work than you think.  Note GOK supports
> "dwell" mode so that it works for users who can only manipulate a single
> button.  Making an on-screen keyboard that supports the same sorts of
> disabilities that GOK supports might be tricky.

I'm not sure what you mean by "dwell" mode here. In AT terminology that 
usually means making mouse clicks by hovering over an area. As far as I 
know GOK does not have this feature built i, but you can use KmouseTool. 
We should really get this built into X IMO. You may be thinking of 
switch operation, of which GOK has a much more advanced implementation 
than onBoard.


> Text to speech would probably be hard to get working with gdmlogin,
> gdmgreeter, gdmsetup, gdmchooser and all pop-up dialogs.  While it might
> be possible to do something that would work okay without AT-SPI, the
> danger is that users might end up in a situation where they don't know
> what is going on with the GUI.  The advantage of AT-SPI is that it
> works better for following the focus and context of what the user is
> doing. 

I agree that an AT-SPI solution is probably the best if you want to 
navigate all the menus of GDM and have read out exactly what they 
contain. I'm just pointing out that adding the spoken line "Welcome to 
<distro>. Please enter your user name." would be relatively simple to 
implement (though the login sound almost serves the same purpose).

Henrik