Re: GNOME Accessibility on by default, and Firefox

[Malte Timmermann <Malte Timmermann Sun COM>]

So many discussions on this topic, so I thought I would also provide my
opinion on this ;)

On Windows, people don't care about such an "Accessibility=on" setting.
They simply start their AT, and it works.

And it doesn't mean that Accessibility would always be on, slowing down
things even w/o any AT running.

Well, we know a big difference is that Windows doesn't have a real
accessibility framework, but I assume it will also work fine when you
first start Lotus Symphony, and AFTER that Jaws to access Symphony using
MSAA/IA2.

If the MSAA/IA2 combo let's allow you to get all information needed w/o
intercepting the app from the beginning, AT-SPI/ATK should also allow
for that. If some API is missing, it should be added.

And as a side note: We have a similar "Accessibility=on" issue with
OpenOffice.org. OOo is not written in Java, but exposes Accessibility
information via JAA. This means we must launch a Java VM with OOo, which
is time and memory consuming, so we don't want to do that for all
people, especially because it's not only about start-up, but also about
runtime performance - the Java Access Bridge will always collect as much
data as possible, even when no AT is running.

So having such a setting in OOo is unfortunately necessary (until having
IA2), but: AT users don't understand it. They don't expect that they
have to enable something for Accessibility.

Conclusion: Try to get rid of that setting, but w/o the implication that
AT-SPI would always actively collect data even with no AT running...

Malte.

Jason White wrote, On 10/25/08 07:54 AM:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 05:22:35PM -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> 
>> Note that I'm not necessarily encouraging or supporting the current  
>> you-get-it-or-you-don't behavior of GNOME.  I'd much prefer NOT to have  
>> a gconf setting to enable accessibility, and I would prefer it to be a  
>> bit more dynamic.  With the current architecture, I think we can get  
>> *close* to this with some extra work.  
> 
> To be clear, what I'm supporting is the proposal not to require a gconf
> setting to enable accessibility, without this resulting in
> performance-degrading events occurring when no assistive technology is active.
> 
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