Re: [orca-list] I'm getting real tired of apps run as root being inaccessible

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

Hi Kendell.
On Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 03:21:14PM AEST, kendell clark wrote:
> hi all
> The subject line pretty much says it all. I'm not writing in to rant but
> I want to crush this bug once and for all. Since manjaro has removed the
> old installer sonar used to use, we have to use their new installer,
> called calamares. The devs have been fantastic and fixed all of the very
> few accessibility bugs that app did have, except for one very annoying
> bug. It's run as root so orca can't get at it.

The way Qt handles working with at-spi is different to the way GTK works with at-spi, see below for more on 
this. So I am surprised that this is an issue. Have you verified that the installer GUI is usable if you 
start it from a normal user account? Yes it wouldn't be able to work properly, but surely the GUI would work 
enough for you to check its accessibility.

> I'm sick of this one
> cropping up and getting in the way. It only seems to affect mate
> desktop, even the gtk3 version. The only desktops that can somehow get
> around this one are gnome and unity. How are they doing it so I can
> either emulate it or have someone look at the code and port it over to
> mate?

It has to do with how the GTK modules are set up. Unity and GNOME have code 
in their settings daemon plugins that configure things such that the GTK 
modules are always loaded when an application loads, irrispective of the user 
account they are run from. I am guessing mate still sets things up using the 
GTK_MODULES environment variable, and I'd hazard a guess that under certain 
circumstances, this variable is not set when a GTK based application is run 
as root. The circumstances I refer to have to do with how one gains root 
privileges to run the app. You can use sudo directly with the command, or you 
can drop to a root shell then run the app using sudo -i. I think sudo 
preserves more of the environment with sudo -i than it does when using sudo 
directly, although using sudo -E should preserve the environment and 
therefore pass through GTK_MODULES such that things work.

Ultimately the best solution would be for the mate devs to examine GNOME's 
settings daemon code and port the gtk-modules configuration code over to 
mate-settings-daemon.

Hope this helps.

Luke