Re: accessebility suggestion for Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD

["Chris Jones" <skating tortoise gmail com>]

Regarding this pointer grabbing Bill keeps mentioning.  I've come
across it once in the sok settings dialog where the listbox grabs the
pointer and then stops the release click on SOK from being detected.
Oddly I got round this by running the settings dialog as a separate
process.

Maybe this problem has been fixed and there is now some kind of anti
grabbing feature in metacity.  It would be good if Bill could give us
a test case when this pops up.

It is possible to detect when pointer grabbing occurs so work arounds
are quite possible I should think.

As to whether GOK should be kicked out for SOK.  I can tidy things up
to make sok really tiny so both should fit on the CD, the only problem
would be confusing users by having two OSK.  Maybe GOK could be re
branded to something more general since it is rather more than an OSK.

There will definately be some things which GOK can do that SOK cannot
by release.  I can see some users being aggravated by this feature
regression.  Although, for a large number of users I think SOK is
already more useful.

Since GOK can not be configured to work out of the box there seems
little point installing it by default.

Bill Haneman wrote:
> For a pointing-only user (who cannot perform a mouse click), these are
> lockout scenarios which effectively hang their desktop sessions, so
> these problems are very serious indeed.

I'm not sure I understand.  Is this something that could be solved by
desktop wide dwell support?

> The "new onscreen keyboard" does not meet the needs of many
> mobility-impaired users.   GOK should be bundled with the LiveCD - once
> some configuration issues are dealt with.

Are there plans afoot to deal with these configuration issues?
Otherwise I think we need to explore alternative approaches.
Imperfect though they may be, we need something that works.

> ???  Because GOK uses GTK+ for its rendering it uses Cairo too.

True.  GOKs poor performance is a mystery to me, I have no idea why
SOK seems faster.  It does however.

> By default GOK gets the physical keyboard's layout from the xserver and
> displays that.  However GOK also has alternate physical layouts that you
> can use.  They are XML files and straightforward to customize by editing
> the XML.

I am also hoping to go down this route.  It is much easier to
personalise these layouts with SOK which many will want to do since a
physical keyboard layout is not necessarily good as an on-screen
keyboard.

> Henrik said:
> > We haven't make any attempt get this into Gnome 2.16 as I could see that
> >there would be strong opposition, but I think we can make a good case
> > for Gnome 2.18.

> Absolutely not.

It's this kind of attitude that discouraged me from asking you for
advice.  I can understand how my approach has riled you as a fair bit
less work has gone in to SOK than GOK, and yet people talk of
replacing it.  However my program is more useful to some people.

I hoped to bring new ideas to the area and you seemed determined to
squash them from the start.

I'm sorry to get personal about this, and your experience and
knowledge would be very valuable to me only it seems impossible to
enlist your help without this kind of prolonged heated debate breaking
out.  It needs to be accepted that there will be differences of
opinion and to work together despite this.

Chris Jones