Re: accessebility suggestion for Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 11:58, Henrik Nilsen Omma wrote:
> Bill Haneman wrote:
> > The "new onscreen keyboard" does not meet the needs of many
> > mobility-impaired users.   GOK should be bundled with the LiveCD - once
> > some configuration issues are dealt with.
> >   
> Do you have any specific use cases that GOK supports but SOK does not? 
> The only one I can think of is users of scanning devices who need to 
> perform actions on the desktop that cannot be achieved with standard 
> keyboard shortcuts (but in my view that's a bug in those applications).

SOK doesn't support any kind of switch-only user, nor does it support
scanning users.  It can only support users who can both point with high
accuracy, and click.

> SOK currently works well with head pointing devices and we are adding 
> scanning device support. We currently do not have direct AT-SPI 
> functionality but we are making a script feature that will let us 
> control desktop functions via dog-tail.

You will find that the pointer-grab problem will defeat many of your
cases if you try to access menus and control programs via AT-SPI.

Toolkit maintainers and authors argue very convincingly that the
problematic behaviors regarding pointer grabs are NOT bugs.

After years of dealing intimately with these problems I am 100%
convinced that any OSK technology that doesn't use some alternative
means of avoiding these pointer grabs is doomed to fail for these users.

For a pointing-only user (who cannot perform a mouse click), these are
lockout scenarios which effectively hang their desktop sessions, so
these problems are very serious indeed.

> You can grab a copy for testing here: 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility/Projects/SOK
> 
> > I am not sure this is the best technical way to solve the problem.  IMO
> > for anything other than shared use kiosks, it makes more sense to put
> > the "access keys" in the login screen such that the AT-SPI support is
> > automatically loaded in the user's session.
> >   
> 
> Yes that would also be good. Is there a standard set of such GDM access 
> keys? This really is something that should be enabled by default, both 
> in Gnome and in Ubuntu.

There are some in the default gdm.conf file, but I am not sure they
would be the best choices for cross-desktop defaults.  If there's a will
to standardize this I suggest we discuss it on
accessibility lists freedesktop org 

I like this idea.  Making AT-SPI load dynamically is theoretically
possible but there are some real feasibility issues; realistically I
don't think it's going to happen anytime soon (though there has been an
RFE open for years).  But allowing a user to request assistive
technologies (or detecting that need via 'gestures') at login time is
very feasible.

> > Henrik - Carlos Diogenes is working on adding Composite to gnome-mag,
> > which would make it work as a drop-in enhancement.  You probably should
> > ping him about this, it makes little sense to duplicate work.
> >   
> 
> Great, I will contact him. We just want to see this implemented, and 
> don't care too much where or by whom. gnome-mag is probably the best 
> place for it.

It would probably be the fastest path to getting it integrated with
Orca, etc.  
best regards

Bill

> - Henrik
> 
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