accessibility profiles, what is it and how it works?

[Rob Whyte]

Hi,
thanks for the detailed explanation.
Look forward to the wiki article.
cheers


On 30/03/16 16:03, Luke Yelavich wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 09:31:46PM AEDT, Pavel Vlček wrote:
>> Hi,
>> after today's update, when I press alt f10 key, I get accessibility
>> profiles menu. I am using Orca normally, but no profile was selected.
>> I changed it to screen reader witch speech. What changet? I am using
>> Ubuntu daily, to install the Ubuntu, I used live dvd from 10th March.
> Accessibility profiles are a way to facilitate the configuration of the
> Ubuntu desktop for people with disabilities. An accessibility profile
> contains settings that improve the usage of the desktop environment for
> particular assistive technologies.
>
> Accessibility profiles have been around for many years now, I think as early
> as Ubuntu 8.04, if not earlier, however until now, they have not been as easy
> to work with. For one, they were only available in the live session or the
> installer, and for another, they were not available post install, and were
> hard coded in a shell script, that was only present in the live environment.
>
> As of Ubuntu 16.04, the accessibility profile system has been much
> improved. The profiles are available on the live session, and during
> installation, and also available post install. So for example, you can now
> create a new user, log into that user, and enable a particular accessibility
> profile for them, without having to manually tweak a bunch of settings.
>
> What you are seeing is the new accessibility profiles indicator. By default,
> the indicator is enabled when any accessibility profile is enabled,
> to allow the switching between profiles if the user so desires. The
> indicator can be turned off from the universal access control panel,
> under the accessibility profiles tab.
>
> One other advantage of the new accessibility profile system is you can now
> create your own profiles, and they will appear in the indicator alongside
> other profiles. The profile system allows for any gsettings key to be
> changed when a profile is enabled. Creating a profile is not yet documented,
> and thats something I have to work on, and it will likely be put on the
> Ubuntu wiki under the accessibility section.
>
> Unfortunately due to time constraints, I was not able to implement this
> support for all Gtk/GNOME based flavours of Ubuntu. Doing so would require
> adding UI to the various desktop environments to allow the profiles
> indicator or equivalent to be enabled/disabled. I would also have to
> code extra modules to properly support GNOME shell, and Mate's own panel
> applet system. Once this work is done however, the design is such that it
> would then be possible for profiles to contain settings specifically for a
> particular desktop environment, so you could have settings for mate that
> would be applied when the profile is enabled, and those settings would
> not be enabled under Unity or GNOME shell.
>
> Luke
>