Francesco: > At 8:42 AM -0500 9/21/07, Brian Cameron wrote: >> Right. It might make sense to provide configure options so users can >> configure whether they want GOK on onscreen to be the >> on-screen-keyboard. This way distros could easily pick between them >> at configure time. This would basically cause the gestures in the >> keymouse and dwellmouse gesture listeners to get set to the right >> command to launch each program. >> >> <snip> >> >> Again, the new D-Bus interfaces may make it easier to manage >> communication between GDM and the session to inform the session >> what AT programs to launch when the user logs in. > > What about the following approach: > > Instead of making GDM launch a specific program, it could indicate what > Assistive Technology to launch. A partial list of Assistive Technologies > could be: > (I tried to find one on the Internet, but did not have much success; so > here is what currently comes to my mind) > > slow keys > sticky keys > mouse keys > onscreen keyboard > dwelling > voice recognition > magnifier > screenreader > braille output > ... > > GDM would for example only tell to start the onscreen keyboard, leaving > it to a sort of "Preferred Application"-Setting to decide whether to > start gok, onboard, xvkb,... > > There already is a "Preferred Application"-Settings Panel for the > GNOME-session that allows the user to choose what application to launch > for visual impairement and what application to launch for mobility > impairement. But it would have to be adapted in that case.
One complication about this approach is that the GDM user does not have currently use GConf where I think these settings are currently set. I suppose we could make GDM depend on GConf to get these settings, but is it worth adding a new dependency for this? The new D-Bus version of GDM does use GConf, so perhaps this is a moot question. :) But it probably makes sense to do this work in the D-Bus branch rather than bothering to add GConf as a dependency in the current stable version. > Ubuntu being the only distribution that I have used, I don't know > whether such an approach would make sense. It would render GDM > independent of specific applications, but it would require a compatible > Preferred Application Setting for the GDM Session; and also for the > GNOME session, if we want the GNOME session to automatically enable the > same Assistive Technologies (screen reader, or onscreen keyboard, or...) > as those that wer enabled in the GDM session. (not necessarily the same > application, for example the system administrator could set gok as > onscreen keyboard during GDM, but a particular user could set the > onscreen keyboard preference to use Dasher in his GNOME session) Right, since GDM GUI's run as the GDM user, the GDM could have different GConf settings. Or we could use a different backend aside from GConf if we didn't want to use that. >> At the moement, I think it makes the most sense to try to get a11y >> plugged back into the D-Bus GDM branch and get it working. Once that >> is done, it should be easier to talk about how we want to add new a11y >> features to GDM. > > Though D-BUS has a mechanism to start applications, I don't know whether > it could also be used in the scenario above; in other words, start a > specific Assistive Technology without indicating what application to > start. I only wanted to present the idea here. Anyway, the approach > indicated in the above quotation will probably be the most practical. Well, GDM would need to have a program that talks to GConf to figure out what the preferred applications are. The GDM GUI programs could either do this directly, or there could be a helper program that the GUI programs talk to in order to launch such programs. >> If you also are interested in enhancing GDM to launch AT programs >> in more novel ways (e.g. by directly integrating them into GDM), then >> we should discuss. > > I looked for any standards on the Internet about how the different > Assistive Technologies should be started, but I was not able to find > something really useful yet. Now I wonder if any standards exists, and > if they do exist, whether they are Desktop or even OS independent. I think historically, only gnopernicus, dasher, orca and GOK have existed. I believe orca has pretty much replaced gnopernicus. So there hasn't been much overlap until now that we have onscreen. Brian _______________________________________________ Gnome-accessibility-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-devel
