Reorganising accessibility features in gnome (suggestion)

[Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik ubuntu com>]

Hello,

I have a comment about the way the Assistive Technology features are 
organised and presented in gnome (and a suggestion for improvement). 
This touches on a bit more than just the AT features themselves, so I 
should probably send this to some general gnome devel list as well 
(desktop-devel?).

The way accessibility features are managed in Gnome is a bit spread 
around ATM. In Ubuntu we are now writing some new software management 
tools which seem to spread things even more, at least in the short term. 
I think it might be time to consider unifying things a bit. 
Accessibility features can currently be altered in the following places 
(I'm using the Ubuntu menu structure names, but other Gnome systems will 
be similar):

1. System -> Preferences -> Assistive Technology Support

2. System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Accessibility ...

3. System -> Preferences -> Theme
 * For selecting high visibility themes

4. System -> Preferences -> Sound
 * For enabling visual feedback of system sounds

5. Application Install tool (+Synaptic)
 * For actually installing the applications. In some cases you also 
need to run Synaptic or apt to install a dependency that is optional 
(like gnome-mag)

6. Applications -> Accessibility -> [app name]
 * You may or may not need to start the application from here. In some 
cases it is set to start a boot (which is useful), but some do not have 
this option.

Possible solutions:

First, I would suggest collecting all the AT feature settings under one 
dialogue, the existing 'Assistive Technology Support'. This might 
require using tabs, as several other dialogues currently have.

Second, when an AT feature is enabled in this dialogue the user should 
be given the option to install the required packages directly. In 
Ubuntu, this currently happens with the 'Shared folders' utility, so the 
infrastructure is already there.

- Henrik