GNOME Accessibility on by default, and Firefox

["Ian Pascoe" <ianpascoe btinternet com>]

Hi

We seem so far to be inter mingleing both Gnome and Windows into this
discussion.  Could people please state which OS their comments apply to in
the first instance?

If I understand what Will has said, the current situation is very much akin
to a chicken and egg one - we want AT to be dynamic, and only load when
required, but for it to load when required it currently needs to be already
loaded and running.

I certainly agree with Tom's use case scenarios.  When I'm using the PC and
another family member wishes to use it, they get annoyed by the AT being
active so disable it - I am unaware of how this impeeds on their experience.

So, going back to Will's earlier mail, we need to know if all or part of the
AT infrastructure can be loaded / unloaded dynamically, and if so what
mechanisum needs to be set in place to allow this to happen. to an aside, if
a user in Gnome has AT running, and a second user is switched to that
doesn't have AT activated, does AT remain running in the background for the
primary user or is it sent to "sleep" with the rest of that user's session
until it is re-awakened?  If not, would this be another use case scenario?

My own thoughts, and I admit I have no technical knowledge here,  would be
to construct a small footprint "watchdog" style damon that runs, if the AT
infrastructure is installed on a Gnome installation, and when AT is
required, it loads up the necessary modules until such time that they are no
longer required.

A further case scenario that comes to mind as well is for those apps which
do not support AT in any form, whilst they are the active window, the
watchdog could unload the AT to ensure that response times are not impaired
by the infrastructure too much - maybe give the damon a config variable that
says how long the AT should remain running until they are unloaded in this
case.  This would mean that the damon would need to be able to interogate
the app to see if AT was available of course.

Two other related questions come to mind, can we accurately determine what
impairment AT incurs on an app for a user not using AT; how quickly can the
various modules be loaded / unloaded.

My only concern through all of this is how much of the supporting
infrastructure would need to be changed to allow this necessary, IMO,
feature to be included, and could it be done gradually, or would it be big
bang?

Ian


-----Original Message-----
From: gnome-accessibility-list-bounces gnome org
[mailto:gnome-accessibility-list-bounces gnome org]On Behalf Of David
Bolter
Sent: 25 October 2008 14:04
To: gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME Accessibility on by default, and Firefox


Jason White wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 05:22:35PM -0400, Willie Walker wrote:
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> To be clear, what I'm supporting is the proposal not to require a gconf
> setting to enable accessibility, without this resulting in
> performance-degrading events occurring when no assistive technology is
active.
>
>
Hi.

I'm interpreting "gconf setting" as "user preference" here, but let's
keep in mind that we can set a gconf flag automatically (for example
from code in atspi, atk, or some bridge) based on platform events. e.g.
"gail_is_live, 1", or "accessibility_is_live, 1".  Is that an abuse of
gconf?

cheers,
David
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