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Re: [orca-list] accessible login

I need to report recent breakage in gdm--not sure exactly when, but
recent, within a month or so.

I have been a great fan of editing my (Fedora) /etc/gdm/custom.conf a
la:

# If SoundOnLogin is true, then the greeter will beep when login is ready
# for user input.  If SoundOnLogin is a file and the greeter finds the
# 'play' executable (see daemon/SoundProgram) it will play that file
# instead of just beeping
#SoundOnLogin=true
SoundOnLogin=/boot/gdm.wav

This is with gdm-2.20.1-4.fc8 on a fully updated Fedora 7.93 (beta).

I've cc'd David and Jonathan from Fedora, because I'm concerned the new
pulseaudio may also be part of the problem. Not only can I not play my
gdm.wav from gdm, I can't get a simple beep either. Alas, after loggin
an ordinary user, I get audio--though root still can't play audio. This
is clearly an a11y bug somewhere--not sure if it's gdm, or just Fedora
implementation.

Janina

Brian Cameron writes:


Janina:

It sounds like your testing shows that in many situations, things are
working properly, which is nice.


GLITCHES:

1.) Always on boot--the first GDM accessible login
attempt--would fail. While Orca would start, I heard "Welcome to Orca,"
I did not hear Orca say, "Panel." And, indeed, I could not get any more
speech until I restarted X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace).


Why would Orca say "Panel" at login time.  I don't think GDM has
any panel?

One thing you can try is to create a gesture listener that will
launch an xterm by adding a gesture to
/etc/X11/gdm/modules/AccessKeyMouseEvents to start xterm.  Then
start the xterm and try running the same orca command that you
find associated with the gesture in AccessKeyMouseEvents file.

Sometimes you can see errors echoed back to the terminal that might
highlight what is wrong when you do this.


2.) In all cases Orca would not launch upon login. I had always to
start Orca by hand (Alt-F2). This is consistently the case on F-7 and
F-7.92, except that Orca does start automatically for me on a fresh
boot, if I do NOT try an accessible login with GDM. I do have the
appropriate checkboxes checked in Assistive Technology Preferences.

    David, should I file a bug? Against which app?


Some of the issues you describe might be caused by mismanagement
of the audio device.  Perhaps the audio device doesn't have the
right permissions in some cases?  In cases when it fails, what
happens if you try to access /dev/audio?  Perhaps some program is
openeing /dev/audio in BLOCKING mode and not closing the device?


3.) If a speech engine that uses OSS is involved, I am able to get
either accessible GDM, or Orca at the desktop, but not both. If I
succeed with accessible GDM, I will be unable to launch Orca for the
desktop. It simply doesn't happen. However, if I login without speech,
Orca starts (via Alt-F2) without problem.

    David, Jonathan, here's the #1 reason to default to espeak and
leave festival as an available, add-on install.


Do you mean to say this problem only happens with festival and not
espeak?  If so, then this is probably a bug in festival.


4.) The strangest circumstance I found myself in gave me espeak at
GDM, but TTSynth (ibmtts) at the desktop (F-7.92). Opening Orca
Preferences showed only the Viavoice driver until I reran 'orca -t' over
ssh. Interestingly, I was able to login and out several times with this
strange espeak plus TTSynth combination--until I reran setup.

    I do not understand this one.


Me either.


5.) Not specific to Orca and GDM, but a problem for accessibility on
Fedora nevertheless -- If I log in and out as several users in some kind
of random rotation, I will eventually lose audio rights if root is also
logged in somewhere.aI can also achieve this with one ordinary user plus
root. I have tried this from several directions, being
careful to login first as an ordinary user, and to insure that an
ordinary user is always logged in.

    I  have not tried gui only logins to see whether I can break
audio that way. However, I believe many users, especially early on, will
be both console and gui logins--so this will be a problem.

    Something in PAM? Would we had an audio group for audio device
access!


I am not sure how audio device permission management is handled on
your system.  But it sounds like you are having problems with how
/dev/audio permissions are managed on your OS.

It might require some configuration to support what you want to do.
Perhaps you need to fix /dev/audio so that it always has read/write
permissions for all users.  Some systems use an "audio" group to
manage this.

It doesn't make sense for all systems to allow all users read/write
access to the audio device.  In a multi-user environment, you don't
really want people competing for the audio device.  But, in an
environment where there is only one user, but the user switches
accounts between root and their user, it might make sense to just
allow all users to always have read/write permissions to the audio
device.

Brian



Brian Cameron writes:

Willie:

This change was made to allow distros to configure where
at-spi-registryd is located, if it is not in the default "libexecdir"
location.  So, distros that install at-spi-registryd to a different
location need to specify --with-atspi-dir=/path when configuring GDM.

If this is their problem, then this should fix it.  This configure
option is new in GDM 2.20.  If using older GDM, then you'ld probably
just need to hack gui/gdmcommon.c to look in the right directory or
backport the new configure option to the older GDM.

Brian



Thanks!  I think the OpenSUSE folks also ran into the same problem.  JP 
seemed to think this change might have been the source of confusion:
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gdm2/trunk/gui/gdmcommon.c?r1=5263&r2=5262&pathrev=5263.  
This change seemed to go in with 
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gdm2?view=revision&revision=5263.
I'm not an expert in how various distributions build things, though, so 
I'm just passing on what I understood.

Will

Brian Cameron wrote:

Janina:

Some thoughts from the GDM maintainer...



Accessible login appears to be broken on every Linux distribution. As
Will points out, this is an issue with distributions. Nevertheless, it's
a serious issue for accessibility.
   

I recently worked with Ubuntu to fix their problems with accessibility
so I think their recent releases should be working.  Their problem was
that they install the at-spi-registryd to a non-default location and
they needed to fix the way they call configure to specify the location
of the registry daemon.  This might be a problem for other distros?

There also have been some useful a11y related bug fixes in GDM 2.20,
so I would recommend using the latest & greatest.



The email below discusses Ubuntu. At the Gnome A11y Summit this weekend
we verified that Suse is broken. My own experience indicates that Fedora
7 and Fedora 7.91 are broken.
   

It would be helpful if people were to file bugs or explain on the
gdm-list gnome org mail list what the problems are.  I'd be happy to
help.  The GDM documentation at the following link has some help
in the "Accessibility" section to explain how to debug some common
accessibility issues with GDM:

  http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/docs.html



Now that our assistive technologies have passed from mostly
developmental software into the realm of usable tools for real people
with disabilities, this situation is no longer tolerable. We must call
on all distributions to institute procedures to insure that accessible
login gets fixed and stays fixed. This will require regular testing, as
there are many ways to break accessible login.
   

There are some well known bugs/issues with accessibility.  For example,
it doesn't work so well with gdmgreeter and some AT programs.  You
probably need to switch to using gdmlogin if you really need to use an
AT that can interact with the widgets.  gdmgreeter would require some
work to really support accessibility properly.  It's main problem is
the way it uses GnomeCanvas for building the theme, and the fact that
it doesn't support keyboard navigation.

Also, failsafe xterm isn't accessible.  Perhaps GDM should be
configurable so you could use it with gnome-terminal, which does support
accessibility?

gdmsetup is also not accessible, and probably can't be as long as it
requires that you run it as root.

Brian




Willie Walker writes:
  

Hi Guy:

The last time I looked, accessible login was broken on Gutsy.  I 
sent information off to the Ubuntu folks for tracking the problem 
down, but I'm not sure where they stand with it right now.

There's some information on Accessible Login here:

 http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/docs/2.18/accessibility.html

Hope this helps,

Will

PS - Accessible login does indeed work - I've tested it on OpenSolaris.

Guy Schlosser wrote:
    

Hey all, how do you enable accessible login in Gutsy?  After I 
updated last night, I now have the login sound, but orca does not 
start automaticly.  Any suggestions?  Also, is there something that 
needs to be done in order to have Orca read items where you have to 
be root to administer?  Finally, one last question.  I noticed that 
firefox 3 was in the Gutsy universe repos.  Why isn't that updated 
after alpha7.  Alpha 8 has been released and a9pre is current.  
Thanks much in advance for any help.

Thanks,


Guy

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-- 

Janina Sajka,   Phone:  +1.202.595.7777;        sip:janina a11y org
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC      http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
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Chair, Open Accessibility       janina a11y org 
Linux Foundation                http://a11y.org
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