Re: Carrying over ATs from GDM to GNOME session (brainstorm)

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Yeah!  Thanks for starting this, Franceso.  It is highly needed feature 
to improve the out-of-the-box experience for GNOME.  If this can be 
achieved, and we can convince distros to turn a11y on for gdm by 
default, we can provide an experience that eliminates the need for the 
user to login, enable a11y, logout, and login again.

> 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.

Coming at it from the user point of view first is the right way to 
approach this, IMO.

Your discussion below seems to be able to be boiled down to the 
question of providing some level of reasonable access to the login 
screen using some assistive technologies, but then allowing different 
assistive technologies (or perhaps just different settings for the same 
assistive technologies) to be used in the user session.  There's also 
the notion of carrying over settings such as theming (for high contrast 
large print, etc.) and AccessX preferences for StickyKeys, MouseKeys, 
etc.

So...just thinking out loud...the two main use cases seem to be 1) the 
initial login of a user, and 2) logins from the same user thereafter.

For the initial login, I'd guess we'd want to automatically carry over 
whatever a11y settings/tools were used at the login screen.  As an 
aside -- I believe GDM already saves these settings in its profile so 
you do not need to re-enable the assistive technologies when returning 
to the GDM screen.  This may or may not be a desirable feature.  I'd 
say it's desirable in personal use systems, but perhaps not so 
desirable in shared systems.  But, the good thing is that GDM at least 
knows what settings need to be retained.

In any case, the user has now logged in for the first time and their 
a11y environment is now identical to what they used on the gdm login 
screen.  For many settings, the user can customize things further and 
the user can also configure any AT's to automatically start when they 
log in.

Now assume the user logs out and gets through the login again.  We have 
two use cases for that: 1) the user logged in using the same a11y 
features as they did before, and 2) the user logged in user different 
a11y features.  This is where things can get a bit crazy because either 
case may end up conflicting with the preferences the user may have set 
for their session.

So...I kind of like your 'carry over' checkbox idea.  If checked, the 
user's a11y environment will be reset somehow with the settings used 
for logging in.  This would help handle the first login of a user.  If 
not checked, nothing will be carried over from the login screen.  This 
would help handle the subsequent logins of a user (who has presumably 
configured their a11y preferences for their desktop).

I think we might want to uncheck the checkbox by default.  If we could 
detect that a user is logging in for the first time or if they modified 
the a11y preferences on the login screen, perhaps we could enable the 
checkbox by default.

Anyway, that's just me thinking out loud.  Many thanks for starting 
this discussion.

Will


> 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