Hi,
this was pushed to devel:
f6dba62 Enable sound in the Unsafe Browser.
I beg to disagree.
My belief is that us actively making the Unsafe Browser work for more
uses than what we want it to be used (in a manner supported by us)
sends a contradictory message to our users, and weakens the warnings
we display about that in the Unsafe Browser dialog message
and documentation.
However, I eventually understood why this change was made.
According to a comment in the forum [1] (not the best place to
document it, if you ask me), the reason was to better support visual
impaired users, in preparation for the day when todo/accessibility is
seriously tackled:
> I think a valid use case for sound in the Unsafe Browser is to make
> it usable for people with sight impairments. I'm unsure whether
> Tails includes any text-to-speech software that actually makes Tails
> usable with such impairments, but even if it doesn't the support
> should be there for the day such software is added.
> Hence commit f6dba62.
[1]
https://tails.boum.org/forum/Enabling_audio_with_unsafe_web_browser__63__/#comment-3a41109b0c2d96eca0509799bb15d67c
Tails has been shipping a screen reader (GNOME Orca) since 0.8,
so the necessity and usefulness of this change can actually be tested.
Orca works quite well with most applications shipped in Tails, but
a quick test shows that it does not work out of the box, as of Tails
0.13, for iceweasel (be it the regular one, or the Unsafe Browser),
and I did not quickly manage to fix this. Once we fix this, I'm not
sure if we can, and want, the Unsafe Browser's session to start and
use a separate instance of Orca, that would bring the need for the
clearnet user to be part of the audio group; I've no idea how ATK and
AT-SPI work; maybe the existing instance of Orca would access the
Unsafe Browser UI? I'd like us to know the answer to this question,
before doing changes that might, some day, fix something, or be
useless forever.
So, either the potential usefulness of this change is displayed a bit
more clearly soon, or I'd rather see us revert it.
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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