a couple of questions about wayland

[Peter Hutterer]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 06:42:59PM -0500, kendell clark wrote:
> hi all
> I'm wanting to start using gnome on wayland a lot more, so I can flush
> out and fix any accessibility related issues. I have a couple of
> questions though, and this seemed the right place to ask them. They're
> mostly related to accessibility. In any graphical file manager, they
> make their icons accessible by adding an image description to the icon
> that orca reads. This enables orca to read, for example, test.txt
> plain text document. So the image description is the mime type. I've
> seen mimetypes such as, application/x-msword, for word documents.
> xcontent/audioPlayer for audio players. Are those mime types tied into
> xorg or does the "x" just represent an extension to the freedesktop
> mime standard? I was hoping that when orca sees my audio player in the
> computer it could say "sansa clip audioPlayer" instead of as it does
> now, "sansa clip unknown". I'm completely ignorant of how all these
> standards operate underneath the hood so if I'm way off the mark, I
> apologize. I do know that when using wayland, gnome shell doesn't draw
> the desktop, so no desktop icons. This is being worked on though so
> it's not a huge deal. My next question is about keyboard shortcuts. If
> we're transitioning to a new display server, would it be possible to
> have universal keyboard shortcuts? That is, you could set up your
> keyboard shortcuts in gnome, and if you switched over to mate, those
> keyboard shortcuts would continue to work? I don't think this is
> possible in xorg because of how xorg works, but in wayland, you could
> set it up so that when mate connects, it is able to see that keyboard
> shortcuts have been set, and map the desktop specific parts, such as
> closing, moving, minimizing windows, etc to it's own internal methods
> for doing so. This is probably not a huge priority since the hard task
> will be getting graphics drivers to work properly but just thought I'd ask

re:shortcuts - there is nothing in xorg preventing this from working right
now. shortcuts in GNOME are largely defined in gsettings and they're
(usually) handled by the WM. Having this work across desktop environments is
not a technical problem, it's a matter of convention and everyone agreeing
on the shortcuts.

note that some of the shortcuts are already effectively universal, e.g.
volume up/down/mute, alt-tab, alt-f4, etc.

Cheers,
   Peter