Bug#948442: gdm3: Unable to enable Orca

[Bernhard Übelacker]

Hello Boris,
I am not involved in packaging gdm or orca
but tried to get more information.
I added also the a11y tag in the hope to get
the attention of the right people.

I tested inside a minimal VM with the gnome package installed.

In the gdm3 login screen I also got no reaction from the
Ctrl-Alt-s shortcut, neither in Wayland or Xorg mode.



Your second command did not work for me, I adjusted it
and prepended a shell before the eval:

  $ sudo -u Debian-gdm bash -c 'eval $(dbus-launch) ; export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS DBUS_SESSION_BUS_PID ; GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true'

This seems to modify the setting but does not immediately activate
orca - just after a reboot speech output worked.

I guess this happens because of using another dbus process.
When using the already running dbus it seemed to work immediately:

  $ sudo -u Debian-gdm bash -c 'export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/run/user/$(id -u "Debian-gdm")/bus; GSETTINGS_BACKEND=dconf gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.applications screen-reader-enabled true'



The Debian Wiki has also a shell before the eval command.
And uses instead of sudo the su command, which
from a regular user requires the not existing password for Debian-gdm.
The Wiki does also not mention the requirement of a reboot.

  https://wiki.debian.org/accessibility#gdm_accessibility



I guess if this "activation" command could be hidden in a
short-named helper script would be helpful.

Kind regards,
Bernhard