Re: Lots of accessibility questions

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Nolan,

> I've recently switched from Debian to Ubuntu and, aside from my
> frustrations with speech not working, things have been so much
> smoother. Today I even managed to use the GNOME accessibility
> components at work; we use Eclipse, and I wasn't expecting much when I
> fired up the GTK2 version, but I'm actually *not* looking forward to
> getting a copy of JAWS and having to switch back to windows. :) I have
> lots of questions now that I'm using this more heavily, and rather
> than sending out lots of smaller messages, I thought I'd lump them
> into one.


I'll take some of you questions, and leave others to other folks.

> Recently I've been looking at Orca...

This is one I'll leave to the Orca maintainer.

> I'm curious about the various Mozilla accessibility tarballs. I'm
> assuming that the various accessibility tweaks are being murged into
> Mozilla's mainline? I know that the last accessibility release was
> several months back; have all of the changes of that release been
> murged into any newer versions, or would I still be better off with
> the older release?

You'll still be a bit better off with the Sun build.  Our most recent build, 
from April 2005, is our branch of Mozilla 1.7.  You can find it at: 
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/accessibility/sun-mozilla-1.7/04-26-2005/

Roughly 80% of our accessibility bug fixes have made it back to trunk.  Most 
of the remainder are in code that has changed so much, it is rather a 
significant amount of work to integrate them.  As we do plan to move to a more 
modern mozilla/gecko, we're looking to do that integration work later, when we 
make that move.  Of course, anyone is more than welcome to do so in advance of 
Sun (we publish a source tarball as well).

> I'm interested in playing with Vino. IIRC, a few years ago, remote
> desktop access wasn't supported, though it was possible. Is this now
> changed?

No clue.  I've never used Vino.

> I'm a bit curious about assistive technology startup. I've been
> adding gnopernicus as a startup session item, but I've noticed the
> screen reader checkbox under the accessibility preferences. Is this
> intended to replace adding Gnopernicus as a startup program? I've
> tried this, and it seems to work, albeit less reliably (I.e. sometimes
> it starts, sometimes it doesn't.) I'll do more debugging if necessary,
> but would simply like to ensure that I'm understanding correctly
> before continuing.

Yes, in earlier versions of GNOME there wasn't as clean a way to specify 
startup applications.  If you prefer to launch Gnopernicus using the new 
mechanism, that's great!

> Also, when is it necessary to set GTK_MODULES? I was using a number of
> apps nicely, then tried running GAIM only to lose
> accessibility. Eventually I remembered that I'd forgotten to copy my
> .xsession which I'd set up ages ago and forgotten about it, at which
> point things worked. I'm just not sure why.

The issue is that some programs call gnome_program_init(), while others don't 
(but still use GTK).  You might consider the former to be "GNOME" apps and the 
latter to be "GTK" apps.  In any case, if a program doesn't call 
gnome_program_init(), it should explicitly check the value of the desktop 
accessibility flag and load gail and atk.  GAIM doesn't do this.  But the 
workaround of setting GTK_MODULES remains an end-user option, as you've 
discovered.

> How do I configure Gnopernicus to run at the GDM screen? Does
> configuring Gnopernicus to work for logins imply that any other user
> on the system will also be running it? (I'm hoping not, as I may want
> to set up a Gnopernicus-free guest account.)

You have two options: make Gnopernicus run at GDM time, or make a "gesture 
listener" run at GDM time which invokes Gnopernicus when the appropriate 
gesture is made (e.g. pressing Ctrl-G for 1 second).  We describe this latter 
approach in detail in the Sun Accessibility Guide (the instructions are 
slightly different for Linux).  See it at: 
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-7307  The key is to edit the 
/etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf  file to specify certain modules be loaded, and to 
specify the gestures in the /etc/X11/gdm/modules/AccessKeyMouseEvents file. 
See the specific section in our documentation at: 
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-7307/6mmks6n8h?a=view

> Think that's enough for now. :) Thanks.

Your welcome!


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team