Re: [orca-list] Lightdm GTK greeter accessibility revisited

[kendell clark <coffeekingms gmail com>]

hi
I've never personally written a killall orca command only to have orca
freeze. When that command is given, orca is killed by the kernel, and
immediately. What I have noticed, and kyle backs this up in his bug
report, is that once orca is started in lightdm's gtk greeter, all
keyboard input never seems to reach lightdm. I can't figure out whether
orca has frozen, or simply has nothing to speak. I seem to remember orca
says "frame" once it is started and nothing more. You can no longer log
in, kill orca, anything.
Thanks
Kendell clark


On 12/02/2015 09:27 AM, Peter Vágner wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As I have said the only thing problematic with lightdm vs orca usage is
> the fact orca can't be killed gracefully. An ugly hack would be a script
> which would trap sigterm and forcefully kill orca however I have started
> this discussion so we can try to find someone who can give us some tips
> on how to address it properly.
>
> If you don't care about starting at stopping orca on the login screen
> i.e. sharing computer with sighted folks then you should be fine
> tweaking it as I have explained at the bug here...
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm-gtk-greeter/+bug/1483864
>
> Have you ever seen a case when you wrote killall orca and orca has
> frozen? Can you reproduce it, then this is something I would like to
> understand better.
>
> Greetings
>
> Peter
>
> On 02.12.2015 at 15:45 kendell clark wrote:
> > hi
> > THis has been going on for quite a while now. I've been following these
> > bugs because they're causing some major issues in our  mate version of
> > sonar. There's a catch 22. I can't include gdm because gdm pulls in lots
> > of gnome, but lightdm causes issues with orca so I can't easily include
> > that. But it's the only other accessible login dm. The best solution
> > would be to use the unity greeter ubuntu and vinux use, but trying to
> > build it in aur pulls in way too many ubuntu specific under the hood
> > components, patched versions of gtk, unity libs, etc. Too much stuff to
> > justify trying to get into community. I can't help you solve it but I
> > wanted to publically encourage you to keep at it since the lightdm
> > people seem to have written this off as too much effort, pick another dm?
> > Thanks
> > Kendell clark
> >
> >
> > On 12/02/2015 05:15 AM, Peter Vágner wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > This is turning in to a little story, so please apologize for posting a
> > > lot of background details.
> > > I am currently trying to run lightdm with lightdm GTK greeter working on
> > > my system. I would like to use it to either login into mate, or login
> > > into xfce4 or login directly into kodi.
> > > Lightdm appears to be only one accessible enough from the minimalist
> > > desktop managers I know of.
> > > Lightdm greeter started implementing accessibility support in a way so
> > > it has preferences to launch on screen keyboard, screen reader from its
> > > menu. The problem with this initial goal was the issue where upon
> > > dismissing the greeter session there was at-spi2 core bus still present
> > > and it was not easy to get accessibility support working inside the
> > > resulting user session after logging in. Here is the corresponding bug
> > > report https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm-gtk-greeter/+bug/1366534.
> > > While in this state I was able to hack around the fact there are lightdm
> > > greeter processes open after the greeter is dismissed by using
> > > session-setup-script and session-cleanup-script to kill these. While not
> > > particularly nice solution this worked pretty well.
> > > There were issues with other stale processes so lightdm GTK greeter now
> > > implements a way to run some helper apps such as at-spi2-core or applet
> > > indicators specific processes remembers their pid's and gracefully kills
> > > these when exiting. While implementing this a feature that causes more
> > > problem than it solves crept in unfortunately. Current versions of
> > > lightdm GTK greeter now set NO_AT_BRIDGE environment variable. The
> > > original reasoning behind this is that when lightdm greeter launches
> > > at-spi2 it should force ATK not to launch it again by setting
> > > ("NO_AT_BRIDGE", to true. The result of this is that orca is started,
> > > at-spi2 is started but these can't communicate to each other I guess. By
> > > experimenting I have found out that orca and ATK won't start another
> > > copy of at-spi2 core if one is already launched by lightdm so I think
> > > this can be removed without risking other possible issues. The
> > > corresponding bug report is at
> > > https://bugs.launchpad.net/lightdm-gtk-greeter/+bug/1483864 .
> > > So given this I hoped we might see awesome accessibility related greeter
> > > experience very soon but unfortunately I've found another issue and this
> > > time I am afraid it might have something to do with orca.
> > > When lightdm GTK greeter is configured with reader in its accessibility
> > > states it includes Screen reader menu item which allows starting orca. A
> > > keyboard equivalent of enabling that menu item is an F4 keyboard
> > > shortcut which is working as a toggle i.e. it switches screen reader to
> > > on or off. Under the hood lightdm GTK greeter launches orca or to be
> > > precise the command configured in its config file, remembers its pid and
> > > then kills that pid when the feature is toggled to off.
> > > What I have just noticed when orca receives sigterm it appears to freeze
> > > here. I am however only able to reproduce this when running inside a
> > > lightdm greeter session and when logged into xfce for example I can kill
> > > orca without issues. This is with orca 3.18.2 and with orca master.
> > > Unfortunately I can find nothing useful in the debug*.out file orca
> > > generates. How would I go about trying to better troubleshoot this?
> > >
> > > I do have some other possibly related questions:
> > > - Orca launches other helper apps such as speech-dispatcher which in
> > > turn may optionally also launch pulseaudio. Should these also be tracked
> > > in lightdm GTK greeter the same way at-spi is?
> > > - When lightdm is running as a systemd service and I call systemctl stop
> > > lightdm the greeter process is terminated however at-spi and I suspect
> > > the other tracked processes are still running. Is this a bug?
> > >
> > > Greetings
> > >
> > > Peter
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > orca-list mailing list
> > > orca-list gnome org
> > > https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> > > Orca wiki: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Orca
> > > Orca documentation: https://help.gnome.org/users/orca/stable/
> > > GNOME Universal Access guide:
> > > https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/a11y.html
> > > Log bugs and feature requests at http://bugzilla.gnome.org