Re: [orca-list] accessible login

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Brian;

Thank you for your prompt and gracious response. I will do my best for
my part, as well. To that end I have cc'd this note to Red Hat with my
latest experience re accessible login on Fedora.

I spent considerable time last night logging in and out on a fully
update Fedora 7 x86_64 machine, and a fully updated Fedora 7.92 i386
system. The results on F-7.92 are very promissing, though there are
still a few issues.

My Fedora 7 is using gdm-2.18, whereas the F-7.92 (a beta release of
what will be Fedora 8 in a few weeks) uses gdm-2.20.0 so is probably the
only one that should really matter. Both of these machines have Red
Hat's build of orca-2.20.0-1.fc8.

The 7.92 system works mostly when Orca is configured with espeak. I am
not in a position to test other Orca AT at this time. I believe the
reason espeak works, were other speech works far less well, is that 7.92
uses portaudio 19. Therefore, espeak is talking alsa directly. With
espeak I was able to login and out accessibly over and over.
Furthermore, I was able to activate system sounds and have both speech
and earcons functioning. Hurray for alsa.

GLITCHES:

1.)	Always on boot--the first GDM accessible login
attempt--would fail. While Orca would start, I heard "Welcome to Orca,"
I did not hear Orca say, "Panel." And, indeed, I could not get any more
speech until I restarted X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace).

2.)	In all cases Orca would not launch upon login. I had always to
start Orca by hand (Alt-F2). This is consistently the case on F-7 and
F-7.92, except that Orca does start automatically for me on a fresh
boot, if I do NOT try an accessible login with GDM. I do have the
appropriate checkboxes checked in Assistive Technology Preferences.

	David, should I file a bug? Against which app?

3.)	If a speech engine that uses OSS is involved, I am able to get
either accessible GDM, or Orca at the desktop, but not both. If I
succeed with accessible GDM, I will be unable to launch Orca for the
desktop. It simply doesn't happen. However, if I login without speech,
Orca starts (via Alt-F2) without problem.

	David, Jonathan, here's the #1 reason to default to espeak and
leave festival as an available, add-on install.

4.)	The strangest circumstance I found myself in gave me espeak at
GDM, but TTSynth (ibmtts) at the desktop (F-7.92). Opening Orca
Preferences showed only the Viavoice driver until I reran 'orca -t' over
ssh. Interestingly, I was able to login and out several times with this
strange espeak plus TTSynth combination--until I reran setup.

	I do not understand this one.

5.)	Not specific to Orca and GDM, but a problem for accessibility on
Fedora nevertheless -- If I log in and out as several users in some kind
of random rotation, I will eventually lose audio rights if root is also
logged in somewhere.aI can also achieve this with one ordinary user plus
root. I have tried this from several directions, being
careful to login first as an ordinary user, and to insure that an
ordinary user is always logged in.

	I  have not tried gui only logins to see whether I can break
audio that way. However, I believe many users, especially early on, will
be both console and gui logins--so this will be a problem.

	Something in PAM? Would we had an audio group for audio device
access!

Janina


Brian Cameron writes:
> 
> Willie:
> 
> This change was made to allow distros to configure where
> at-spi-registryd is located, if it is not in the default "libexecdir"
> location.  So, distros that install at-spi-registryd to a different
> location need to specify --with-atspi-dir=/path when configuring GDM.
> 
> If this is their problem, then this should fix it.  This configure
> option is new in GDM 2.20.  If using older GDM, then you'ld probably
> just need to hack gui/gdmcommon.c to look in the right directory or
> backport the new configure option to the older GDM.
> 
> Brian
> 
> 
> >Thanks!  I think the OpenSUSE folks also ran into the same problem.  JP 
> >seemed to think this change might have been the source of confusion:
> >http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gdm2/trunk/gui/gdmcommon.c?r1=5263&r2=5262&pathrev=5263.  
> >This change seemed to go in with 
> >http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/gdm2?view=revision&revision=5263.
> >I'm not an expert in how various distributions build things, though, so 
> >I'm just passing on what I understood.
> >
> >Will
> >
> >Brian Cameron wrote:
> >>Janina:
> >>
> >>Some thoughts from the GDM maintainer...
> >>
> >> 
> >>>Accessible login appears to be broken on every Linux distribution. As
> >>>Will points out, this is an issue with distributions. Nevertheless, it's
> >>>a serious issue for accessibility.
> >>>    
> >>
> >>I recently worked with Ubuntu to fix their problems with accessibility
> >>so I think their recent releases should be working.  Their problem was
> >>that they install the at-spi-registryd to a non-default location and
> >>they needed to fix the way they call configure to specify the location
> >>of the registry daemon.  This might be a problem for other distros?
> >>
> >>There also have been some useful a11y related bug fixes in GDM 2.20,
> >>so I would recommend using the latest & greatest.
> >>
> >> 
> >>>The email below discusses Ubuntu. At the Gnome A11y Summit this weekend
> >>>we verified that Suse is broken. My own experience indicates that Fedora
> >>>7 and Fedora 7.91 are broken.
> >>>    
> >>
> >>It would be helpful if people were to file bugs or explain on the
> >>gdm-list gnome org mail list what the problems are.  I'd be happy to
> >>help.  The GDM documentation at the following link has some help
> >>in the "Accessibility" section to explain how to debug some common
> >>accessibility issues with GDM:
> >>
> >>   http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/docs.html
> >>
> >> 
> >>>Now that our assistive technologies have passed from mostly
> >>>developmental software into the realm of usable tools for real people
> >>>with disabilities, this situation is no longer tolerable. We must call
> >>>on all distributions to institute procedures to insure that accessible
> >>>login gets fixed and stays fixed. This will require regular testing, as
> >>>there are many ways to break accessible login.
> >>>    
> >>
> >>There are some well known bugs/issues with accessibility.  For example,
> >>it doesn't work so well with gdmgreeter and some AT programs.  You
> >>probably need to switch to using gdmlogin if you really need to use an
> >>AT that can interact with the widgets.  gdmgreeter would require some
> >>work to really support accessibility properly.  It's main problem is
> >>the way it uses GnomeCanvas for building the theme, and the fact that
> >>it doesn't support keyboard navigation.
> >>
> >>Also, failsafe xterm isn't accessible.  Perhaps GDM should be
> >>configurable so you could use it with gnome-terminal, which does support
> >>accessibility?
> >>
> >>gdmsetup is also not accessible, and probably can't be as long as it
> >>requires that you run it as root.
> >>
> >>Brian
> >>
> >>
> >> 
> >>>Willie Walker writes:
> >>>   
> >>>>Hi Guy:
> >>>>
> >>>>The last time I looked, accessible login was broken on Gutsy.  I 
> >>>>sent information off to the Ubuntu folks for tracking the problem 
> >>>>down, but I'm not sure where they stand with it right now.
> >>>>
> >>>>There's some information on Accessible Login here:
> >>>>
> >>>>  http://www.gnome.org/projects/gdm/docs/2.18/accessibility.html
> >>>>
> >>>>Hope this helps,
> >>>>
> >>>>Will
> >>>>
> >>>>PS - Accessible login does indeed work - I've tested it on OpenSolaris.
> >>>>
> >>>>Guy Schlosser wrote:
> >>>>     
> >>>>>Hey all, how do you enable accessible login in Gutsy?  After I 
> >>>>>updated last night, I now have the login sound, but orca does not 
> >>>>>start automaticly.  Any suggestions?  Also, is there something that 
> >>>>>needs to be done in order to have Orca read items where you have to 
> >>>>>be root to administer?  Finally, one last question.  I noticed that 
> >>>>>firefox 3 was in the Gutsy universe repos.  Why isn't that updated 
> >>>>>after alpha7.  Alpha 8 has been released and a9pre is current.  
> >>>>>Thanks much in advance for any help.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Thanks,
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>Guy
> >>>>>
> >>>>>_______________________________________________
> >>>>>Orca-list mailing list
> >>>>>Orca-list gnome org
> >>>>>http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> >>>>>Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
> >>>>>          
> >>>>_______________________________________________
> >>>>Orca-list mailing list
> >>>>Orca-list gnome org
> >>>>http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-list
> >>>>Visit http://live.gnome.org/Orca for more information on Orca
> >>>>      
> >>
> >>_______________________________________________
> >>gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> >>gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> >>http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
> >>  
> >

-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.202.595.7777;	sip:janina a11y org
Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC	http://CapitalAccessibility.Com

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