Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Willie Walker wrote:
> Excellent discussion so far.  I'm going to write up a summary shortly.

Here's what I'm seeing from this good discussion:

PRIMARY ARGUMENTS AGAINST ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
---------------------------------------------------

1) Performance.  From recent tests, it does look like the ATK/GAIL 
peering can add significant memory overhead to each GTK+ app, and this 
will happen regardless of whether assistive technologies are used or 
not.  This is a valid concern, especially if the overhead is as bad as 
my tests seem to indicate.  :-(

2) Stability.  Some people mention concerns about stability and have 
personal anecdotes about a11y seeming to make things crash.  Others have 
personal anecdotes about a11y not causing any stability issues at all.

PRIMARY ARGUMENTS FOR ENABLING A11Y BY DEFAULT:
-----------------------------------------------

1) It's easier for a person w/o disabilities to turn it off than it is 
for a person with disabilities to turn it on.

2) The a11y infrastructure can be used for more things than just a11y. 
Consider, for example, an on screen keyboard for devices w/o physical 
keyboards.

3) Better overall testing/usage coverage for all users.  If a11y were 
enabled by default, we'd end up rooting out problems that developers 
might otherwise ignore or just be unaware of.  That is, people with 
disabilities want just as much stability as people without disabilities, 
except they don't have the option of disabling accessibility.  As the 
GNOME development community, I think it is our responsibility to work 
together to identify and fix stability issues.  Even stronger, I find it 
unacceptable to say "my component has issues with a11y enabled, so I'm 
going to ignore a11y and just disable it.  Let those crazy a11y pundits 
give me a patch if they want it so bad."

POSSIBLE WAYS FORWARD:
----------------------

1) Turn it on by default.

2) Keep it off by default.  Re-evaluate the situation once the 
AT-SPI/D-Bus work is complete.

3) Keep it off by default.  Provide some sort of best practices document 
for OS distributions to include some sort of "enable/customize 
accessibility" option as part of the installation process.  This might 
also spill over into an "enable/customize accessibility" option in the 
users and groups administration tool.

4) Keep it off by default.  Provide some sort of "refresh this session" 
support that keeps the user logged in, but basically kills everything on 
the desktop and restarts gnome-session.  With this, users would have the 
similar "you must enable accessibility support" experience that they 
have today, but they wouldn't need to log out and log back in.  Note 
also that this should probably be coupled with the user experience for 
selecting the automatic start of an assistive technology when the 
session starts.

5) Keep it off by default.  Provide some sort of mechanism to start the 
at-spi-registryd and another for GTK+ to retroactively load/enable ATK/GAIL.

Does that seem to cover where we are so far?

Will