Ubiquity, GNOME, and accessibility.

[Luke Yelavich]

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Greetings all
At UDS Boston, I briefly talked with Colin about accessibility, and the only-ubiquity option to only launch ubiquity on the live CD. Since this option will be easily made available to users in the gfxboot screen re-organisation, I am writing to discuss implementing accessibility for this feature, as only using Ubiquity will be selectable by those who may wish to enable accessibility.

Since only the necessary parts of GNOME are launched along with ubiquity, in order to provide wallpaper, theme, and window management, all running as root, and since from my checking that this all gets run by ubiquity itself, some work needs to be done, both on the ubiquity side, as well as the casper side. From what I understand about the way things work now, the following needs to happen.

* If any accessibility profile is selected, and only-ubiquity gets activated, casper will have to set all gconf settings for the root user.
* If the accessibility profile chosen requires the use of the at-spi-registryd daemon, ubiquity will have to be notified that it has to run this daemon.

I think the above two points are the only things that need addressing, as from what I can gather, gnome-settings-daemon gets run, which sets a lot of gconf settings, including those for keyboard accessibility, mouse, wallpaper settings, and theme. Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

I am quite happy to work on the casper side of the implementation, and am also willing to work on the parts of ubiquity that need changes made, if I am pointed in the right direction. The only other question is whether it would be better to make use of gconf from within ubiquity, or whether it would be better to add another command-line argument, to tell ubiquity that accessibility needs to be enabled.

At this point, I am not so worried about KDE, as its accessibility is nowhere near the same as what is available for GNOME, and I don't understand KDE's settings system, however if someone would like to work on the KDE side, it would be much appreciated.

If anybody has any other suggestions, or thoughts on the above matter, I would be glad to hear them. I would like to see this implemented as soon as possible, so I can get users of accessibility to test it, and thereby provide more accessibility testing of ubiquity, as making use of the GUI installer will be a lot easier, if the above does get implemented.

Thanks in advance for your time.
- -- 
Luke Yelavich
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