[u-a-dev] Potential suggestion for UDS: Dwelling out of the box

[Francesco Fumanti]

Hi,


As you probably know, Ubuntu is shipping mousetweaks, an application that offers dwelling (*), already for several cycles. It is really unfortunate to have the dwelling feature available in Ubuntu, but users that need that feature do not have a way to enable it by themselves.

The only thing that would be needed, is an item somewhere on the screen that activates the dwelling feature of mousetweaks, when the user hovers for a short time with the pointer over that item.


- For GDM:

As GDM shows an accessibility icon by default, I suppose that using it would be the most straightforward solution.

For example, what about making the accessibility dialog of GDM open by hovering with the pointer over the accessibility icon? Moreover, an additional dwellable item would be necessary in the dialog to enable dwelling. Of course, the accessibility icon and the dwell item of the accessibility dialog have to be sensitive to dwelling by themselves, as mousetweaks is not running at that point. (The purpose of the procedure is to turn on the dwelling feature for mousetweaks.)

As GDM and mousetweaks are imported from GNOME, I already asked for such a feature in GNOME itself; but it has not been realised yet.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589906
http://live.gnome.org/GDM/EaseOfAccess
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=599113


- For Unity:

Is there a plan to add the accessibility icon by default to the top menubar? In this case, it could work similarly to GDM...

The Unity people might however prefer some other solution to the problem...

During the discussions in GNOME, there was also the proposal to automatically enable in the desktop session, the accessibility tools that were running in GDM. However, this approach will probably be more complicated, because it has to take different things into account: for example, some users might define different accessibility tools in GDM and in the desktop session...


- For Ubuntu Desktop Classic:

The mousetweaks package includes a dwell applet for the gnome-panel. This dwell applet offers a dwellable button to enable/disable mousetweaks and 4 additional buttons to define what type of click (left, right, double or drag click) should be automatically performed next.

This is not a solution out of the box because the dwell applet is not installed by default on the gnome-panel. However, once the dwell applet installed on the panel, a dwell user is able to enable and disable dwelling on the desktop according to his needs...



I am writing this letter to ask whether this is something that could be considered for the next UDS; moreover, if it is appropriate for UDS, is there anybody, for example somebody from the accessibility team, that could endorse the problem for UDS?

It would also be useful to know, what is acceptable for Unity and what is not. (For example, the accessibility icon by default on the top panel of Unity.) If a solution out of the box turns out not to be welcome for various reason, we could could in that case try to approach it as much as possible; for example, with something similar to the dwell applet of the Classic Desktop...


A copy of the message goes to a few people from the accessibility list and to Gerd Kohlberger, the author of mousetweaks.Thanks for reading and considering this long message.


Cheers,

Francesco


(*) Dwelling is a function that automatically produces a mouse click after the pointer has been motionless for a short amount of time. Left clicks, right clicks, double left clicks and drag clicks can this way be performed by users not able to use a hardware button.