[pkg-cryptsetup-devel] Accessibility in the initramfs

[Jonas Meurer]

Hello, and sorry for the delayed response.

On 27/02/2009 Andrew Pollock wrote:
> We've got a blind user, and we've modified the cryptroot initramfs stuff so
> that it issues a two-tone beep when the password prompt (for disk
> encryption) is displayed, and another two-tone beep after the disk is
> successfully decrypted.
> 
> We've made these changes against cryptsetup 1.0.5-2 that's in Ubuntu 8.04,
> in such a way as they can be opt-out by default, and opted in by a config
> file in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d
> 
> We'd like to get the changes back in upstream so we don't have to keep
> maintaining them. It means for us, we'd just opt-in via the configuration
> file, but by default it wouldn't beep. The benefit for Debian: support for
> blind users with disk encryption at early boot.

that indeed would be a great benefit for debian. please provide any
patches that you have.

> It looks like 1.0.6 is a bit different, notably the password prompting seems
> to be unified into /lib/cryptsetup/askpass regardless of whether a boot
> splash is used or not. That simplifies things and complicates things at the
> same time.

askpass now is the prefered method to prompt for passwords. it even may
be used for different passphrase prompts that don't correspond to
cryptsetup in the future.

> I'm happy to provide a patch, my main question is are you okay with
> askpass.c calling out to the beep binary from the beep package (this would
> introduce a dependency on the beep package), or do we have to embed beep
> functionality directly into askpass.c?

I would prefer to not introduce any direct dependencies for askpass.
instead a small beep function should be provided in askpass.c directly.

greetings,
 jonas
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