Re: GDM accessibility sans AT-SPI

[David Bolter <david bolter utoronto ca>]

Hi Henrik,

Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> 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.
>
>
>   
GOK has a dwell access method, where "access method" is an expression 
for a "way of navigating and activating keys on the on-screen 
keyboard".  Since the assumption is that GOK users are using a non-core 
pointing device, off-keyboard mouse clicks are current done by driving 
the core mouse pointer around the desktop via specialized gok keyboard 
keys.  I think it would be a valuable addition to add a good Dwell 
core-pointer user mode to GOK sometime in the future.  Note Dwell users 
might, as you say want to use a utility like KMouseTool + Dasher.  I 
wish we could be informed more by our users in this regard.

cheers,
David
> > 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
>
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