Hello, As discussed during DebConf15, we target enabling the accessibility stack by default. I've studied that a bit more, here are my thoughts:
In the end, it boils down to a few things (there are a lot of ways to get them done, but in the end, that's what actually triggers the accessibility layers in toolkits): - For gtk3, this is already done actually, whatever the desktop. - For Qt4, qt-at-spi has to be installed and the environment variable QT_ACCESSIBILITY has to be set to 1. - For Qt5, the environment variable QT_LINUX_ACCESSIBILITY_ALWAYS_ON has to be set to 1. - For gtk2, libgail-common and libatk-adaptor have to be installed and the gail and atk-bridge modules be loaded. qt-at-spi, libgail-common and libatk-adaptor are already pulled by pyatspi, which is used by gnome-orca to implement accessibility, so we can consider this done. The gnomish way of getting the gail and atk-bridge modules loaded is using a gsettings schema. That will however only work if gnome-settings-daemon is running, which will not be the case in a lot of desktop environments. The other way is to just set the environment variable GTK_MODULES to gail:atk-bridge. So in the end, I'd say it boils down to defining these three variables. A standard way of getting this done for graphical desktops is adding a script to /etc/X11/Xsession.d/90accessibility which does that. That will work when the graphical desktop is started from a display manager (e.g. gdm, etc.), as well as when the user runs startx without specifying an X client and without a ~/.xinitrc script. The case which will not work, however, is when the user runs e.g. startx /usr/bin/fvwm or when she runs startx and she has a ~/.xinitrc script. A way to work around this would be to define the environment variables directly in /etc/environment, but this perhaps looks overkill? Once that done, check-a11y's make check works fine by default under fvwm for instance. Samuel
