Hi We seem so far to be inter mingleing both Gnome and Windows into this discussion. Could people please state which OS their comments apply to in the first instance?
If I understand what Will has said, the current situation is very much akin to a chicken and egg one - we want AT to be dynamic, and only load when required, but for it to load when required it currently needs to be already loaded and running. I certainly agree with Tom's use case scenarios. When I'm using the PC and another family member wishes to use it, they get annoyed by the AT being active so disable it - I am unaware of how this impeeds on their experience. So, going back to Will's earlier mail, we need to know if all or part of the AT infrastructure can be loaded / unloaded dynamically, and if so what mechanisum needs to be set in place to allow this to happen. to an aside, if a user in Gnome has AT running, and a second user is switched to that doesn't have AT activated, does AT remain running in the background for the primary user or is it sent to "sleep" with the rest of that user's session until it is re-awakened? If not, would this be another use case scenario? My own thoughts, and I admit I have no technical knowledge here, would be to construct a small footprint "watchdog" style damon that runs, if the AT infrastructure is installed on a Gnome installation, and when AT is required, it loads up the necessary modules until such time that they are no longer required. A further case scenario that comes to mind as well is for those apps which do not support AT in any form, whilst they are the active window, the watchdog could unload the AT to ensure that response times are not impaired by the infrastructure too much - maybe give the damon a config variable that says how long the AT should remain running until they are unloaded in this case. This would mean that the damon would need to be able to interogate the app to see if AT was available of course. Two other related questions come to mind, can we accurately determine what impairment AT incurs on an app for a user not using AT; how quickly can the various modules be loaded / unloaded. My only concern through all of this is how much of the supporting infrastructure would need to be changed to allow this necessary, IMO, feature to be included, and could it be done gradually, or would it be big bang? Ian -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of David Bolter Sent: 25 October 2008 14:04 To: gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org Subject: Re: GNOME Accessibility on by default, and Firefox Jason White wrote: > On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 05:22:35PM -0400, Willie Walker wrote: > > >> Note that I'm not necessarily encouraging or supporting the current >> you-get-it-or-you-don't behavior of GNOME. I'd much prefer NOT to have >> a gconf setting to enable accessibility, and I would prefer it to be a >> bit more dynamic. With the current architecture, I think we can get >> *close* to this with some extra work. >> > > To be clear, what I'm supporting is the proposal not to require a gconf > setting to enable accessibility, without this resulting in > performance-degrading events occurring when no assistive technology is active. > > Hi. I'm interpreting "gconf setting" as "user preference" here, but let's keep in mind that we can set a gconf flag automatically (for example from code in atspi, atk, or some bridge) based on platform events. e.g. "gail_is_live, 1", or "accessibility_is_live, 1". Is that an abuse of gconf? cheers, David _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list _______________________________________________ gnome-accessibility-list mailing list gnome-accessibility-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
