Re: Vetruvian icon on a locked screen

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Francesco:

> > So, a consistent a11y mechanism for the login screen, user desktop,
> > and screen lock seems like it would make a lot of sense.
>
> For pointer-only users there is another situation besides login, desktop
> and a locked screen that should be considered, though I am not sure
> whether it is directly related to this: the situation, where an
> application goes fullscreen and requires some keyboard input to leave
> the fullscreen.

On-screen keyboard programs use struts to prevent other programs from
using the space needed.  However, this obviously doesn't work for
programs that go into "full screen" mode.

Perhaps it would be useful to define a window manager extension that
allows the user to configure what "full screen" means.  For some users,
it may mean the actual full screen, while for other users it may be the
full screen that isn't being used by programs which have defined struts.

> > > VT switching also locks the screen when you switch away from a
> > > running user session.
>
> For a pointer only user, switching to a virtual terminal will render his
> computer inaccessible for him, because as far as I know, the user lands
> in a fullscreen shell with only keyboard input. Having a way to at least
> get out of that situation would be great.
>
> On the other hand, let's suppose that a pointer only user has a way to
> use a virtual terminal. If the main use of a virtual terminal (I don't
> know what the main use of a virtual terminal is) is to get out of a
> desktop that got stuck because of a problem, this will probably not be
> helpful for a pointer only user, because in this case chances are that
> also the onscreen keyboard will not respond anymore to mouse clicks,
> making it impossible for him to even get to the virtual terminal.

There are two types of VT.

- There are console VT's which drop the user to a text console, and is
  typically useful for developers who want a way to drop down to a
  shell window, or to fix a problem with the system.  As you say,
  this is probably not very useful to pointer-only users.  Though you
  might be able to use emacspeak or something to make VT console's
  useful for some accessibility use cases.

- There are graphical VT's which run graphical user sessions.  This
  is used by the "User Switcher" applet to allow multiple users to
  be logged into the same machine, and to allow switching between
  these graphical user sessions.  This use case would likely be useful
  to some pointer-only users.

  However, there are some issues with using graphical VT's.   There
  can be problems with how device ownership and permissions are
  managed when doing VT switching.  For example, some switch devices
  might require some special configuration to allow the device to
  be shared by whichever user has control of the current graphical
  VT.

Brian