Hi Alan,
Thanks for your reply.
On 05.05.2011 22:05, Alan Bell wrote:
Hi Francesco,
thanks for the email, that was informative and timely.
1) The discussions around different options came about because of a
suggestion from the upstream Gnome accessibility team that we should
consider using the 'official' gnome on-screen keyboard which is now
Caribou. So far I have been unable to install caribou and I am not
sure what it's good features are really. I think there should be one
keyboard that serves as an accessibility tool, is the keyboard for
tablets and touchscreens (including multitouch), looks good and can
be used for innovative layouts such as the steno chording layout.
That would be the ideal situation, but I wonder whether it is possible to
achieve it. I remember the situation with the onscreen keyboard GOK. It seemed
to be targeted mainly at switch users and that fonctionality was hindering
pointer users to have a smooth experience with it.
Moreover, GOK had a lot of options; do we really want to confront pointer users
with options they do not need or do not even understand? You might reply that
it might be possible to hide options according to its usage; but that will
probably not be easy; especially if we also want a zeroconf onscreen keyboard.
By the way, what is the steno chording layout?
One
current challenge is getting the keyboard to type into the unity-3d
interface (works fine in unity-2d) and this is mostly a unity issue
although I wouldn't discount the possibility that some integration
might need to touch the keyboard (things like the keyboard not
zooming in and out with compiz zoom).
Yesterday, I wrote an email to the ayatana dev mailing list about the issue,
but have not got any reply yet. I wonder whether it arrived at destination as
it seems to be a dev only mailing list.
marmuta, the person who has done most of the development lately on onboard has
a bit of time at the moment for onboard. Do you know who we should contact in
order to solve the issue?
2)
Does this mean that LightDM is going to replace GDM?
no, it means the possibility is going to be discussed at UDS. A lot
of things get discussed and sometimes we decide not to do them - or
maybe decide to revisit the possibility some releases later.
Does anybody of the accessibility team attend these discussions in order to
make sure that the accessibility aspects are also taken care of?
3) that is a good point and some interesting suggestions, we already
know it is too hard to start onboard without the use of a hard
keyboard,
The onboard source package shipped with desktop files that would make onboard
appear under the Universal Access menu. However, when packaged to create the
deb, the source was always patched in order to have the Universal Access menu
hidden by default.
I have not investigated yet, but since Unity, that changed the method of
launching applications, this might not be necessary anymore.
it would be ideal if dwelling could be turned on without
clicking. (still not quite as bad as asking people to press space
when they see the icon at the start of the installer to get to the
screen reader install)
I would say both situations are quite bad for the affected users.
A real dwell user normally is not able to click; thus we cannot count on him to
produce a click with some hardware device to enable dwelling
(dwelling=automatic clicking after a timeout).
That is why I propose an item that itself reacts on dwelling to start the
dwelling feature. The dwell applet for the gnome-panel had such an item, but as
I already mentioned in my previous email, it was only a partial solution.
Indeed:
- It was a solution only for the desktop session, not for the login screen. (On
computers with only one user, a work around was to enable automatic login.)
- It was not a solution out of the box, as somebody able to click by hardware
had to install the dwell applet on the panel, before a dwell user could use it.
For the sake of completness, the old GDM offered another approach to start some
accessibility tools at the login screen: the user had to perform specific
gestures with the pointer on the screen and depending on the gesture, a
determined accessibility tool was started.This is not a good solution in my
opinion, because there is no clue on the screen about the gesture feature and
also no information about what gestures to perform. We are far away from an
intuitive and obvious solution here.
Cheers,
Francesco
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