Re: GNOME Accessibility on by default, and Firefox

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Thanks Tom!

I hope my e-mails are not being taken as being too snarky.  I'm really 
trying to understand the use case.  From what I can tell, a use case 
based upon what you describe might be a public information kiosk that is 
unable to reset itself.  Or, perhaps a user has varying levels of 
accessibility needs throughout the day.  Or, maybe someone is just 
giving a demo.

So, a user might come along and use an assistive technology and then 
exit it.  As a result, the system might be left in a state where 
accessibility remains in use.  These seem like edge cases, but are worth 
considering.  I'd guess that the majority of real world use cases, 
however, are where the user needs accessibility enabled every day, all 
day, for every application.

Note that I'm not necessarily encouraging or supporting the current 
you-get-it-or-you-don't behavior of GNOME.  I'd much prefer NOT to have 
a gconf setting to enable accessibility, and I would prefer it to be a 
bit more dynamic.  With the current architecture, I think we can get 
*close* to this with some extra work.  My main point was that I believe 
it will require work in the thing talking to ATK (e.g., GAIL, Gecko, 
OOo, etc.) and is independent of the D-Bus work.

But, I might be missing something,

Will

Tom Masterson wrote:
> Here is my understanding of this thread that I have been quietly watchig
> from the sidelines.
>
> WHat is being asked for is something closer to the windows model.  In
> other words if accessibility is needed by an AT app like orca then it is
> started and runs.  However if it is not needed it is not being used.
> THis can be important on a computer used by many people where one wants
> accessibility and one does not.  In windows you simply shut down the
> screen reader and the lag it introduces goes away which is not the case
> in Gnome as far as I can tell.
>
> Ideally of course there would be no difference between having an AT
> program running and not but given that there is extra proccessing
> involved that isn't likely to happen.
>
> DOn't know if that is a correct reading but it is my understanding.
>
> Tom
>
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 04:23:51PM -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
> > > BTW, I'm not sure about the details of what the Gecko
> > > > implementation does, but it would surprise me if it *always* loaded the
> > > > accessibility modules regardless of the gconf setting.
> > > Afaik we do just use the gconf setting, which is the problem. Then we  
> > > start creating accessible objects, firing extra events, doing extra  
> > > processing for DOM mutations, lalala. What other check should we use  
> > > before turning it on?
> > To be clear, if the gconf setting is not set, then no accessibility  
> > support will be enabled in Firefox.  Is that right?
> >
> > If so, I'm confused.  By enabling accessibility, the user is saying they  
> > want accessibility enabled.  But, it seems like the argument being made  
> > here is that even if the user enables accessibility, they really don't  
> > want it.
> >
> > I think I might have missed the actual use case (I've been out of the  
> > country for the past week).  Can you describe why someone would call to  
> > order pizza and then complain when it is delivered?  Seems to me they  
> > should not have ordered it in the first place.  ;-)
> >
> > >  > However, *something* needs to already be awake so that an assistive
> > >  > technology can discover the top level application object in the 
> > > first  > place.
> > ...
> > > Any time any app asks for even the root accessible object for a given  
> > > window, that window receives a signal.
> > This may be the case on Windows, but I don't believe it is the case for  
> > GNOME.
> >
> > Will
> > _______________________________________________
> > gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
> > gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
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