GDM accessibility support

Mark McLoughlin markmc at redhat.com
Tue May 25 20:31:05 UTC 2004


Hey,
	I was asked by someone about accessibility support in GDM and although
I knew GDM had some sort of accessibility support I didn't know what it
was or how it worked. I've had a poke and here's what I can tell:

   * GDM now comes with a set of accessibility modules that can be used 
    to detect certain events happening on the login screen

   * The two modules shipped with GDM by default are the 
    "DwellMouseEvents" and the "KeyMouseEvents" modules. Both of them 
     allow you to activate the onscreen keyboard from the login screen 
     in different ways. The first by moving the mouse around in a 
     predefined order and the second by clicking the mouse or pressing 
     keys in a predefined way. Take a look at the configuration files in
     /etc/X11/gdm/modules on FC2.

  * If you set AddGtkModules=true and uncomment the GtkModulesList line 
    from gdm.conf, you should be able to try this out. You'll also need 
    to install the latest "gok" package from rawhide. I'd recommend 
    setting Greeter=/usr/bin/gdmlogin in gdm.conf also because that 
    seems to be the only way of testing the dwell listener.

  * So, to activate gok you should now be able to either hold Ctrl-k 
    down for a second and leave go or move the mouse over the login 
    window from top to bottom and then left to right.

  * gok then comes up, but I haven't figured out how to do anything with
    it. Its either that gok is broken or I'm missing something obvious. 
    I'm guessing its the form - accessibility stuff is in the habit of 
    being terribly broken :/


	So, that's all I have time for now, but if someone had the time to do
more on this I'd recommend for a start:

  - Figure out how to actually use gok once its activated
  - Get the gok in rawhide pushed to FC2-updates

Cheers,
Mark.





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