No audio in GDM -- A severe a11y problem

[William Jon McCann]

Hi Janina,

As you may or may not know, we have completely rewritten GDM between
F8 and F9.  I hope that you'll be happy to know that full a11y support
is one of the principle requirements for this rewrite.

We are working to integrate a11y tools directly into the greeter in a
way that they haven't been before.  I think you can already see some
results from this work, such as providing access to an a11y tools
dialog by default.

That said, the GDM developers are not a11y experts.  So, we'd really
appreciate input from you and other experts in this field.  It would
be great to have a discussion around this on the upstream GDM mailing
list.
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gdm-list

I'll try address some of your specific concerns.

At the moment, we don't support the SoundOnLogin configuration option.
 However, gnome-session does play a sound when it starts and GDM does
beep when authentication fails.

We do enable the sound service in the greeter by default.  One of the
principle reasons for this is to enable a11y features.

There seem to be a number of bugs in orca and the festival speech
synthesis engine that are causing some problems when trying to run the
screen reader in the GDM greeter.  I have personally been spending
quite a bit of time trying to track these down.  Unfortunately, our
a11y stack isn't the easiest thing to work with.  Some of these are
fixed in rawhide since the beta and still others have yet to be fixed.

We've been working really hard to make sure that Fedora is (by
default) an a11y friendly OS but we can really use your help to make
sure we achieve that goal.

I highly encourage you to engage the upstream GDM list and help us
design the best way to integrate a11y into the greeter.

Thanks,
Jon

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Janina Sajka <janina at rednote.net> wrote:
> 've successfully upgraded two machines from F-8 to the F-9 beta. A diff
>  against my old /etc/gdm/custom.conf indicates Anaconda didn't touch that fil. Even after disabling pulseaudio, however, I am NOT getting audio out of GDM--snipet from custom.conf follows.
>
>  Please note this presents a serious a11y issue, as those of us unable to
>  use display screens now have no indication when we might login to the
>  desktop. The audio I dinciate doesn't play, and there is no beep when
>  backspacing in the Login and Password fields.,
>
>
>  [greeter]
>  # Always use 24 hour clock no matter what the locale.
>  Use24Clock=true
>  # If SoundOnLogin is true, then the greeter will beep when login is
>  # ready
>  # for user input.  If SoundOnLogin is a file and the greeter finds the
>  # 'play' executable (see daemon/SoundProgram) it will play that file
>  # instead of just beeping
>  SoundOnLogin=true
>  [ ..snip.. ]
>  SoundOnLoginFile=/boot/gdm.wav
>
>  Yes, the file exists and plays for [p]aplay.
>
>  PS: It's a corollary issue, but preventing all audio before completion
>  of gdm login presents a serious a11y issue. In addition to the above
>  noted problem with this approach, there are significant use cases for
>  console audio which may, or may not, be logged in before the gui.
>  Indeed, some may never login on the gui. In a11y that would include
>  users of speakup, emacspeak, and brltty among others.
>
>  I have yet to play with pulseaudio as a system daemon to see if that
>  resolves the problem of console audio, but having no audio until a login
>  is successful as the default circumstance doesn't make Fedora an a11y
>  friendly OS.
>
>  Janina
>
>  Janina Sajka,   Phone:  +1.202.595.7777;        sip:janina at a11y.org
>  Partner, Capital Accessibility LLC      http://CapitalAccessibility.Com
>
>  Marketing the Owasys 22C talking screenless cell phone in the U.S. and Canada
>  Learn more at http://ScreenlessPhone.Com
>
>  Chair, Open Accessibility       janina at a11y.org
>  Linux Foundation                http://a11y.org
>
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