Carrying over ATs from GDM to GNOME session (brainstorm)

[Francesco Fumanti <francesco fumanti gmx net>]

Hi,



I have been asked to start a brainstorm thread about how the assistive 
tools that a user has activated in GDM can automatically be started in 
the GNOME session.

As I suppose that it will probably be the gnome-settings-daemon that
will be responsible for the carrying over of the ATs activated in GDM
and I only know little about how it works, this email will mainly
concentrate on the point of view of the user. I hope that other people 
will take the opportunity to add their own view about the problem to 
this thread, regardless of whether it is a technical view or not.



The first question that comes to my mind: can the carrying over be 
always active because GDM is by itself able to determine when to carry 
over the ATs, or is an option necessary for the user to activate the
carrying over?

Let's start with the case where there is an option for the user to
activate the carrying over, as it is the more simple case:

On obvious location for the option would be the accessibility dialog of
GDM. This will however have the consequence that there will only be one 
option for all the users. It might be better giving each user an own 
option; the option could for example only appear after the user has 
entered his login name and before he enters the password. In this case, 
the accessibility dialog is not anymore a good location for the carry 
over option; it might be better to make it appear under the password 
entry field; and it only needs to appear when the user has activated one 
or more assistive tools.



Next question: What should happen if the user activates the carry over 
option and there already are other tools to automatically start in the 
GNOME session? For two different onscreen keyboards, that should not be 
a problem if they are started simultaneously in the GNOME session; but 
what about two different screen readers?

A good solution to this problem might make the carry over option useless 
if GDM is able to determine by itself what tool to carry over.


Let's consider the case where there is the carry over option and it is 
specific to each user. I can imagine that the user activates it at least 
the first time he uses the GNOME session; if he uses different assistive 
tools in the GNOME session than in GDM, he will probably not activate it 
in the following GNOME sessions as I assume that he has configured his 
GNOME session to automatically start the assistive tools that he wants.


Is there anybody with ideas about a reliable way to automatically 
determine what assistive tools to carry over by taking into account the 
assistive tools configured to automatically start in the GNOME session? 
Is there anybody with a slightly different or even a completely 
different approach to the whole problem? Please step in and inform us 
about it; it is the purpose of this thread.


Cheers,

Francesco