Bug #12384

Forward Greeter accessibility settings to the GNOME session

Added by alant 2017-03-19 17:32:53 . Updated 2020-05-01 17:15:59 .

Status:
Confirmed
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
alant
Category:
Accessibility
Target version:
Start date:
2017-03-19
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Feature Branch:
Type of work:
Code
Blueprint:

Starter:
Affected tool:
Welcome Screen
Deliverable for:

Description

Accessibility support is getting better in the new Greeter, but the settings chosen in the Greeter are not automatically forwarded to the GNOME session, so if one needs some accessibility tool, then they need to enable it twice. And if they need help from someone else to do so, then they need to request such help twice.

Relevant dconf settings, i.e. those one can modify from the Universal Access menu (there’s more one can fine-tune in the Universal Access settings panel but that’s irrelevant here as the user cannot do that in the Greeter):

Implementation resources:

Subtasks

Related issues

Related to Tails - Bug #7500: Tails Greeter is not accessible Duplicate 2014-07-06

History

#1 Updated by alant 2017-03-19 17:33:59

  • related to Bug #7500: Tails Greeter is not accessible added

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2017-03-19 18:47:27

  • Subject changed from Forward greeter accessibility settings to the session to Forward Greeter accessibility settings to the GNOME session
  • Category set to Accessibility

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2017-03-19 18:50:05

  • Description updated

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-02 08:16:58

  • blocks Bug #9260: Orca reads neither Tor Browser nor Thunderbird if started after it added

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-02 08:18:17

  • blocked by deleted (Bug #9260: Orca reads neither Tor Browser nor Thunderbird if started after it)

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-02 08:18:26

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-02 08:18:40

  • blocks Bug #9260: Orca reads neither Tor Browser nor Thunderbird if started after it added

#8 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-09 10:33:10

  • Description updated

Implementation-wise, the hardest part probably comes from the fact the Debian-gdm user will need to elevate privileges in order to affect the amnesia user’s settings. We achieve that with our usual method for forwarding settings: the Greeter saves a11y settings in some format (dconf dump? VAR=VALUE?) to /var/lib/gdm3/tails.accessibility, then PostLogin reads + validates that file and sets them in /etc/dconf/db/local.d/ + runs dconf update (alternatively, it could directly run dconf/gsettings command as amnesia, but that requires a D-Bus session bus though, which we probably don’t have yet at this point, so we would need to use dbus-launch and ensure the temporary D-Bus daemon is killed before we proceed with the next steps, which feels more cumbersome than writing flat text files).

It feels somewhat wrong though to do this in a Tails-specific way: other GNOME-based distros might want the same behaviour. But in practice the problem we set out to solve here mostly affects Live systems:

  • for single user systems, the problem does not exist: distro installers automatically enable a11y in the installed system when it was enabled during the initial installation;
  • for multi-user systems, each user has to configure their a11y prefs only once (on first login) and they’ll be remembered.

So all in all, doing this in a Tails-specific way doesn’t seem too bad. Still, reporting a whislist bug to GDM and/or AccountsService upstream would be nice :)

#9 Updated by anonym 2017-11-15 11:44:33

  • blocked by deleted (Bug #9260: Orca reads neither Tor Browser nor Thunderbird if started after it)

#10 Updated by intrigeri 2020-04-15 06:02:14

  • Affected tool changed from Greeter to Welcome Screen

#11 Updated by zersiax 2020-05-01 17:15:59

It seems this one hasn’t been updated in a while, is this still relevant today?
I would offer that for things like screen readers, this isn’t a huge dealbreaker as you can just enable it using the hotkey. This is cumbersome, but doable. Things get more murky when assistance is required to initially start the AT, though.