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Ask Slashdot: How To Handle Unfixed Linux Accessibility Bugs?
dotancohen (1015143) writes "It is commonly said that open source software is preferable because if you need something changed, you can change it yourself. Well, I am not an Xorg developer and I cannot maintain a separate Xorg fork. Xorg version 1.13.1 introduced a bug which breaks the "Sticky Keys" accessibility option. Thus, handicapped users who rely on the feature cannot use Xorg-based systems with the affected versions and are stuck on older software versions. Though all pre-bug Linux distros are soon scheduled for retirement, there seems to be no fix in sight. Should disabled users stick with outdated, vulnerable, and unsupported Linux distros or should we move to OS-X / Windows?
The prospect of changing my OS, applications, and practices due to such an ostensibly small issue is frightening. Note that we are not discussing 'I don't like change' but rather 'this unintentional change is incompatible with my physical disability.' Thus this is not a case of every change breaks someone's workflow."
The prospect of changing my OS, applications, and practices due to such an ostensibly small issue is frightening. Note that we are not discussing 'I don't like change' but rather 'this unintentional change is incompatible with my physical disability.' Thus this is not a case of every change breaks someone's workflow."
Goddamn that was painful, but I found the actual patch:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xo...
I would say it is rather shocking that this Peter Hutterer actually did about 90% of the work, then posted something that is not a clue as to how to see the answer.
And that the original poster (who I assume made this Slashdot story) did not post any followup for 3 months, probably leading Peter to forget all about fixing this.
Basically what you want is to escalate this issue so that it gets more attention. As this affects people with disabilities I suspect you may get some results if you try to contact the Linux Foundation, who may then be able to twist a few arms or throw some resources at the problem as needed. You could, for example, point this very thread out to "pr@linuxfoundation.com" and let them know that this is a bit of a black eye against Linux.
So far, we know that Peter caused the change, Peter knows that, and Peter knows how to put it back. Peter isn't sure that it's broken since it now follows the written spec. Ideally, we'd like Peter to fix it, but for that we need to convince Peter that the new behavior is wrong and it SHOULD be reverted. If he chooses to, it will take many seconds to revert the change.
What I'd do next is find the written documentation of the behavior in earlier versions, in Windows, and OSX. YOU said they all work the other way, but the spec says otherwise. So prove your case by linking to written documentation. When you post the links, mention "the principle of least surprise", a term meaning that users should not be surprised by the behavior of the software.
Also, right now ONE person on the planet has said they don't like the new behavior. If EVERYONE in a large group is having a problem with it, a few could post saying so. I'm sure there are forums and such related to accessibility, so ask around. Find out for sure, are other people reall having great difficulty with it? If so, will they post in the ticket?
Then mail Peter and request that he look at it. You could ask how much would be a fair contribution for his time spent looking into it. (Answer - about $20 - $50).
If Peter doesn't respond, email the project maintainer, mentioning that Peter seems to be unavailable and asking that the maintainer look at it.
If those two options fail, that single-line change is so small that any Linux programmer could compile a copy for you with it reverted. It would only take a minutes. Two years from now, if an important update comes out, someone could easily do the same with the new version. Obviously that's less desireable than getting the upstream source fixed, but it fixes YOUR problem.
I'll bet this is going to be patched in the git repositor within a half hour.
Reverting would be easy - I'm don't know enough about X to understand if the IsMaster(mouse) test can easily be augmented to not break StickyKeys, but fixing a null pointer dereference is something that needs to be done.
But for just the users' use case (and people will hate this) - this is where paying somebody to deal with the problem for you comes in.
A decent hacker would have done the work you did in the first hour, created a distro patch in the second, and put up a repo with the new packages in the third. Throw in an hour for testing.
It seems likely that there are enough people affected by this that if they all threw in a dollar it would have been done by the next day. What we might have here is a community coordination problem, not just a software bug.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I agree. Last I heard, we *wanted* people to use Linux on the desktop.
That's just a rumor that the Gnome guys would take issue with.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
The open source community is pretty cool. Simply getting together in the right forum would likely get the right people interested in helping you. Hell I'd start with posting to Slashdot... hey... WAIT A MINUTE WE'VE BEEN HAD!!!
Read the bug report. The accessibility feature works. The submitter (who also happens to be the bug reporter) found a fairly minor subfeature (the ability for sticky key modifiers to act as lock keys) has been broken recently. I say fairly minor, because the only key this might be critical for in certain use cases is the Shift key, where a separate Caps Lock is already available. Exaggerating the issue by claiming it makes accessibility on Xorg unusable and bitching on slashdot because its been a whole 11 weeks since he found the problem and noone has released a fixed version yet is just grandstanding.
Read the bug report. The accessibility feature works. The submitter (who also happens to be the bug reporter) found a fairly minor subfeature (the ability for sticky key modifiers to act as lock keys) has been broken recently. I say fairly minor, because the only key this might be critical for in certain use cases is the Shift key, where a separate Caps Lock is already available.
The bug is asking for the wrong fix
Different modifiers have different combinatorial effects. Caps Lock is not necessarily Caps Lock, in other words. I know that most Linux people hate them because they are cheap, and you have to do a "disable secure boot" dance to install Linux on them, but ChromeBooks, in particular, lack a Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is achieved by hitting both shift keys simultaneously.
If that isn't convincing enough, consider Alt-Gr vs. Right-Alt behaviour on international keyboards that report a USB HID country code of 00h.
While I was working on ChromeOS at Google, there were a number of obvious usability issues for the OS, but the majority of them stemmed from the need to upstream support into Linux, and the difficulty of doing this without involving an Alan Cox, Ingo Molnar, or similar personage when you were dealing with things which crossed area boundaries. Input is one of these areas, and it was rather difficult and roundabout to get support for non-adjusted raw system time stamps in evdev inputs, even as a non-default option.
Exaggerating the issue by claiming it makes accessibility on Xorg unusable and bitching on slashdot because its been a whole 11 weeks since he found the problem and noone has released a fixed version yet is just grandstanding.
I agree the issue is exaggerated, but mostly because I disagree about where in the input stack usability issues should be addressed. The usability belongs in the input stack, as does the internationalization, below the point at which events are reported to the console, or to X (or Wayland or whatever display server is handling the apps and forwarding the input events).
It's pretty easy to see where this breaks down by enabling "programmer mode" (meaning: disabling "secure boot mode") on a ChromeBook, and enabling root or other console logins. It's easy to see the shift-shift (or Caps Lock, if you plug in a standard USB keyboard) and internationalized input don't work the same on the console as they do in the graphical environment.
In general, the input stack in Linux has a *lot* of problems. A fun experiment to try is plugging in 3 or 4 USB keyboards, and playing with the Caps Lock; the light goes on or off on whatever keyboard you're playing with it on, but the actual Caps Lock state depends on whether you've hit the Caps Lock key on an even or odd number of keyboards, and the keyboard Caps Lock lights very quickly become desynchronized from the actual Caps Lock state (i.e. turning Caps Lock on on keyboard A lights the light on A, and hitting it on B turns it on on B, rather than off on A, even though the state is that Caps Lock is no longer in effect).
Similar issues occur when using sticky modifiers for usability, and when moving between virtual consoles with various modifier/Caps Lock/etc. states in effect.
I understand the idea that you may wish to explicitly allocate resources in a multihead environment, but the input stack really doesn't do that very well, either - these modifiers should happen in the input stream above a stream join as a resource allocate by a virtual console or display server, and not in the display server or the underlying driver.
Windows doesn't support multihead well (at all, for multiple sessions, without something like Citrix intermediating the process), but it also doesn't screw up on where it put the internationalization translation tables and the dispatch routines and the usability.
PS: In case you care, AFAIK, there are zero vendors who put the correct internationalization keyboard code type in the USB