Ubuntu-accessibility Digest, Vol 66, Issue 9

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Alex Midence <alex.midence at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be able to do it in 11.10.  To make
>> it possible to just flip a screenreader on would require that
>> QT_ACCESSIBILITY environment variable be set to 1 in *all* sessions as
>> a default.  With Qt-AT-SPI installed, this'd cause a huge performance
>> impact because Qt-AT-SPI is too new to have been optimised yet.
> <snip>
>
> I understand.  Here's another one for you then:
>
> Could a script be used that would insert the needed lines into the
> configuration file for KDE?  Any user who wanted to activate it could
> run it from a console session.  It could have a name like
> ACTIVATE-SCREENREADER and require root priveleges to be run.  The fact
> that it is written in upper case and that it is a long string along
> with it's requiring sudo before it is run should preclude any
> possibility of someone running it accidentally.

Actually, you wouldn't want it to be sudo, because you don't want your
user's KDE config files to be owned by root.  A regular script should
work fine though.  I really doubt anyone's going to accidentally type
"kscreenreader --enable" and have no idea why the computer is talking
to them later.  There was discussion in the kde-accessibility IRC
channel yesterday of integrating it into KAccess (the KControl Module
for turning on various accessibility features) as well.

Fregl (QAccessiblity developer at Nokia) is at a
KDE-and-GNOME-together accessibility hackfest where today they are
going to be brainstorming how to make it possible to enable this stuff
at runtime, in which case the hotkey thing would then be possible.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan