[orca-list] keyboard trouble

[Mike Gorse <mgorse mgorse dhs org>]

Hi all,

I'm writing this in case anyone else runs into what I've just been 
fighting with (I alluded to it the other day in a reply on here).

My keyboard seemed to mysteriously stop working in X the other day while I 
was using pidgin (and switching in and out of a console).  I couldn't even 
press ctrl-alt-backspace to leave X or ctrl-alt-f1 to get back to a 
console.  I asked on #opensuse-gnome if anyone else has run into this, and 
Vincent Untz asked me if a key would register if I held it down for ten 
seconds.  I figured out that, if I held down a key for a second or more, 
then it would, in fact, register, at which point he correctly guessed that 
I had "slow keys" enabled.  It is an accessibility feature to help people 
with motor difficulties who have trouble quickly getting their finger on 
and off a key.  So I ran this:

gconftool-2 --set -t bool 
/desktop/gnome/accessibility/keyboard/slowkeys_enable false

so now things work again as I'd expect.  If shift is held down for eight 
seconds and some accessibility setting is enabled (I'm not sure exactly 
which setting it uses), then slow keys get enabled, and a dialogue pops up 
asking if it should stay enabled.  This dialogue does not get read by 
Orca, though, perhaps because it is not given focus.  Vincent says that he 
is fixing this, and apparently I am the third person to have run into it 
(the current behavior can be problematic even for a sighted user since the 
dialogue can be obscured by another window and so the user might not know 
what is going on).

-- Mike Gorse / AIM:linvortex / http://mgorse.freeshell.org --