Re: boot-time accessibility issues

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

The idea of detecting the presence (or absence) of a blind-related device seems worth pursuing, even if there are some issues to be resolved.

For example, following Jude's notion of checking for a monitor, maybe Avahi and SSH could be enabled whenever a monitor isn't found.  For that matter, enabling Orca (or whatever) by default when no monitor is present wouldn't be that big a problem for a sighted user.  Devin's notion of checking for a braille display could be expanded to include a range of USB devices such as braille printers and such.

I've been wondering about the notion of checking for a USB flash drive that contains some sort of magic files.  The files probably can't contain executable binary files (due to hardware incompatibility issues), but they could certainly contain textual configuration data.  Can anyone suggest ideas for file content, format, naming, etc?

-r