Ubuntu
gnome-control-center package

Session entry refers to "the preferred AT" (the what?)

Bug #121525 reported by Lee Maguire on 2007-06-21

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #146918: Poor descriptions for some applications in Startup Programs window. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	gnome-control-center (Ubuntu)	Confirmed	Low	Unassigned

Bug Description

Binary package hint: capplets-data

Looking at the sessions editor to identify a process generating error messages, I see that one of the selected entries reads:

Visual
Autostart the preferred AT

Even though I'm vaguely familiar with (although not a user of) Assistive Technology the acronym wasn't immediately familiar. I needed to search to determine what this entry was for.

I would suggest that the name and comment in
/usr/share/gnome/autostart/gnome-at-session.desktop
be more descriptive and not use the AT acronym.

Revision history for this message

Henrik Nilsen Omma (henrik) wrote on 2007-06-21:

Agree. This could be changed to Assistive Technology. (screen reader would be better, except sometimes it's not a screen reader but a magnifier).

Changed in gnome-control-center:
importance:	Undecided → Low
status:	New → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

steve s. (snsansom-deactivatedaccount) wrote on 2007-09-04:

Agree. Only way I found out what this was was from this bug report. Seeing as most people don't use AT (whoops, Assistive Technology ;-)), it would nice for people to know what it is so they can disable it if they are optimizing their system performance...

Revision history for this message

era (era) wrote on 2007-11-20:

This is also reported in bug #146918 as part of a bigger bug report generally about the usability of the Sessions preferences. I have a couple of comments on this particular problem there.

I would respectfully suggest that the priority of this bug should perhaps be raised, seeing as clear, understandable, unambiguous, short, jargon-free labels would be especially important for users who actually require assistance.

Is the Sessions preference really necessary? Concretely, I think it's problematic and confusing to have two places where you can turn off assistive technologies. If you uncheck this thingy in the Sessions preference, will the assistive technology requested by the user in the AT prefs fail to run?

I'm not a native speaker, so I might be out on a limb here, but to me, "Assistive Technology" is not a very transparent term, either. If the pref is still needed, could the label be made even clearer with something like

[x] Visual Assistance
Start the preferred Assistive Technology (screen reader, magnifier, etc)

Note the addition of "Assistance" to the short headline. That alone might even be enough of a clarification that the parenthesis in the extended description might not be necessary.