Description of problem: consolehelper breaks accessibility.. all these packages listed here http://intranet.corp.redhat.com/ic/intranet/DogtailUsabilityList.html (marked with *) are assistive technology capable but because they use consolehelper our tools based on at-spi technology cannot see applications widget/action structure (accerciser, sniff). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 1.88-3.el5.1.i386 but also 1.96.1-1.x86_64 from fedora How reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1.switch on assistive technology in GNOME and restart X 2.run sniff (dogtail rpm) - has to be run as the same user as target app will run 3.run application from that list I mentioned above 4.run the same application via its original command (i.e. /usr/sbin/system-config-boot) Actual results: app structure cannot be seen in at-spi tools Expected results: see app structure in at-spi tools Additional info:
If I configure consolehelper to pass the GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge environment variable, the application still doesn't register to the user's AT-SPI registry; instead, apparently because it runs as root, it uses a separate bonobo-activation server and at-spi-registryd, both running as root. Matthias, is there a way to let the application running as root use the user's ORBit2/bonobo servers? Using the unprivileged user's ORBIT_SOCKETDIR value doesn't help. Vladimir, as a workaround you can usually simply start both dogtail and the tested application as root without using consolehelper, by running PROGRAM from /etc/security/console.apps/$your_application instead of /usr/bin/$your_application.
I have never investigated what it would take to make root processes use a users a11y infrastructure, because running the gui as root is just wrong. We have a framework to get away from that with PolicyKit. Of course, that doesn't help on RHEL5...
Oh well, WONTFIX then. Thanks.