Turn accessibility support on by default

[Edward Catmur <ed catmur co uk>]

Some background: after testing some accessibility features I left
accessibility turned on (i.e. Preferences->Accessibility->Assistive
Technology Preferences->Enable assistive technologies). Although I don't
use assistive technology myself, leaving the setting on means
accessibility can be tested without having to log out and in again;
making the (barely noticeable) performance hit worth it.

A few weeks of reduced stability, difficult-to-reproduce segfaults
(always with Gail and/or Atk in the backtrace), fixing bug[1] after
bug[2] after bug[3], I've had to turn it off again to be able to recover
my productivity. (These bugs took *ages* to analyse and fix.)

My conclusion is that gail, atk and atk-bridge are simply not getting
enough testing, meaning that bugs in Gnome accessibility or in
interactions between applications and Gnome accessibility can be
introduced by developers without realising and persist for ages without
being fixed (the developers don't have accessibility turned on, so they
don't realise that they've introduced a bug).

This could be resolved by turning accessibility on by default, at the
gconf key /schemas/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility. It wouldn't
affect existing user accounts, of course, but would affect new accounts,
in particular (importantly) testing environments. The very minor
performance hit would surely be worth the benefit in vastly increased
testing of accessibility and interactions. And, of course, distributions
could turn it off if they so wished.

It can't be good that people who need accessibility support are forced
to endure degraded stability; how accessible is Gnome if things break
when accessibility is turned on?



Ed Catmur



[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122855 Ghex crashes after
closing the application (After opening a HEX file)
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313523 Deadlock in
atk-bridge/bridge.c when global event listener triggered in non-main
thread holding GDK threads lock
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313626 Banshee GUI freezes
for some time on startup after "Loading" stage