[Accessibility] AT wizard

[Patrick Shirkey]

Hi,

Just found out about this list. I am working with 64 Studio to create a
custom built AT distro for a client in Australia. We are receiving a very
modest amount of funding to achieve this goal and have now been working on
the project for 9 months. During this period I have written a wizard for
AT users to enable setting up the gnome desktop prior to logging in to the
first session. The logic in the wizard is flexible so with time or funding
it would not be difficult to make it work for any desktop environment.

We have found that there are a couple of blockers to making this work
effectively with gnome/gdm which people round here might have some ideas
on.

1: The buttons in the wizard do not have accessibility speech enabled when
in gdm so tabbing does not provide speech assistance. The ideas we have
for getting around that are to enable orca in gdm by default, integrate
with AT-SPI or respond to button active events programatically.

The latter is probably the quickest to implement but I have a feeling it
will cause speech assistance to be triggered twice after tabbing into a
button when in the desktop or if orca is already running.

2: Running in GDM post-session means that the config settings cannot be
saved to the gdm config folders as they are not writable at that stage of
the login process. A suggestion from Ray Strodes on the GDM list is to run
the script from the stock Xsession file (/etc/gdm/Xsession) as that runs
all the shell scripts in /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ before executing the
users session. IIUC this will run the wizard prior to login. Anyone have
another suggestion or arguments for or against this method?

I am happy to post the tarball privately if anyone wants to view it in
action. We are not quite ready for official release yet.


Cheers


-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.