Re: Proposal: enable accessibility by default for GNOME

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Mathias:

> Ok, I agree, that it is ridiculous that currently accessibility has to
> be activated manually.

Agreed.

> What makes me wonder: Can't we improve our to enable those features on
> demand? As far as I understand the accessibility tool chain it consists
> of those components:

In GDM 2.20 and earlier, it supported the ability to define keypress
(hotkey), mouse-button-press, and dwell gestures (implemented by
moving the mouse in-and-out of the login screen in various patterns).
These gestures were used to launch AT programs on demand as needed by
users.

With the new GDM rewrite, these features were dropped.  Now that GDM
uses gnome-settings-daemon, it was suggested that the best way for
this to work would be to implement such on-demand AT launching features
in gnome-settings-daemon in a way that it would work for both the
login screen and the user session.  Presumably you could also use a
similar (or the same) mechanism when installing.  This way the same
mechanisms work in all places.

It was discussed that there probably needs to be 3 types of programs
that can be started via this mechanism:

- an On-screen keyboard (would be nice to support both dwell-type
  and single-button type users separately)
- a magnifier
- text-to-speech and braille support

Most likely these features would be launched in a
lowest-common-denominator fashion so that it would work for the most
users.  The idea being that users would then navigate to the preferences
to best configure how they want a particular AT program to work.  This
would obviously be a one-time event for the user session.

It is probably also necessary to support hotkey, button-press, and
dwell gestures for launching the three types of programs to support
the widest range of users with accessibility needs.  However, the dwell
method implemented in GDM (moving the mouse in-and-out of the login
window) probably doesn't make as much sense when running in a user
session.  However, there are other "dwell" type gestures that could
be implemented that would be more generally useful (such as moving
the mouse to points in the screen in some pattern or something).

To me, this seems the best approach.

Brian