Re: [orca-list] Administrative program accessibility on OpenSuSE compared to Ubuntu

[Mike Gorse <mgorse alum wpi edu>]

On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Jacob Schmude wrote:

> However, there's another nasty accessibility problem in 11.1 that affects any 
> non-GTK application trying to use at-spi, such as Firefox, Openoffice, and 
> Mono/Winforms. Due to a modified gnome component, these applications will not 
> work with accessibility, they do not get exposed properly. I'm unsure if this 
> is related to whatever change was made to allow easier admin access, but I

This is unrelated to ORBit.  There is a long discussion at 
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=535827

Basically, gtk+ was modified to automatically load gail and atk-bridge, so 
that they would still load if a user switched to another user and the 
environment wasn't passed on.  Some programs, such as Firefox and the 
uia-to-atk bridge, implement their own accessibility layer that will not 
work if gail is loaded.  These programs needed to be updated, and gail and 
at-spi now allow a program to set an environment variable to tell them not 
to load.

> Thanks, I'll try and get that working here. What, incidentally, is the 
> sudo command from the terminal using? Is it just an interface to su on 
> OpenSUSE?

It is using sudo. :) Sudo may or may not pass on any particular 
environment variable depending on what options are set in /etc/sudoers.

-Mike G-