Re: Carrying over ATs from GDM to GNOME session (brainstorm)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi André:

Thanks for joining in!

You won't get disagreement from me that what you mention would be a nice 
solution.  Anywhere an interface is provided to add a new user to the 
system (e.g., system installation, new user dialog, etc.) is an 
opportunity to enable a11y appropriately for the user.  These are things 
that have been on my wish list for a while.  :-)

Doing this will require cooperation from the distros to add a11y 
features to their installers (e.g., Ubuntu's 'speech profile') and it 
will also require a11y provisions to be added to the new user dialog.  I 
believe both of the user interfaces to these touchpoints can be somewhat 
distro-specific, however, so the solution can become somewhat complex 
and likely to be error prone because not every distro is a responsible 
a11y citizen.

I believe the GDM handoff to the user session tends to be somewhat 
consistent across distros.  As a result, I think the carry over is a 
touchpoint where GNOME can provide a consistent workable solution.

Also, the GDM carry over doesn't prevent the ability to add something 
such as an "Accessibility" tab to the new user account dialog or to read 
accessibility preferences from LDAP (or a USB stick, your 
bluetooth-enabled mobile phone, etc. -- there's been work/research going 
on in this space for a long time).  Instead, it should be a relatively 
straightforward solution we can get to quickly.  The result will vastly 
improve the current out-of-the-box experience for GNOME a11y and 
increase the user's chance of being able to operate independently.

So, I'd view this as more of "low hanging fruit" that we can grab while 
also shooting for tighter integration with user management.  I also 
don't view it as something we'd end up eventually throwing away.  We can 
never expect all distros to provide proper accessible installs and it's 
doubtful all system administrators will make sure to enable a11y 
preferences properly for new users, and it's doubtful we'll see generic 
electronic a11y profiles appear until the proper committees have been 
formed and some W3C or OASIS group anguishes over the file format for 
years, and everybody ends up just ignoring the spec anyway.  ;-)

Will

Andre Nuno Soares wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Speaking solely as a blind user, I think this issue is being looked at
> the wrong way.
>
> The thought is: "A user shouldn't have to configure accessibility in GDM
> and then again in the Desktop".
>
> But the thought should be: "why does the user need to configure
> accessibility (in the Desktop) if he already exists in the system?"
>
> Accessibility is a requirement of the user, so it should be enabled when
> the user is created in the system, just like enabling  the mounting of
> the cd-rom drive, choosing the terminal shell  or allowing sudoing to
> root.
>
> This doesn't seem very complex to implement, but I don't know of any
> Gnome setup that does it, and so we end up with accessibility being
> configured twice when the user logs for the first time or soon after.
>
> This makes even more sense if you consider "roaming profiles", be it in
> a campus/corporate setup or the cloud. 
>
> AFAIK this doesn't exist in Gnome yet, but gconf at least already
> supports LDAP and DB backends, and I think there are already some
> experiences with roaming profiles.
>
> For GDM accessibility, the proposed keyboard shortcuts/gestures would
> solve the problem.
>
>
> Just my 0.02€ 
> André
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list