Pointer grabs causing accessibility issues! Why not deprecate them?

[Francesco Fumanti]

David Zeuthen wrote:
> Certainly, the grabbing in the PolicyKit authentication dialog is not
> for really for security per se [1], it's simply there to avoid things
> like people entering their password into their IRC client etc. That's
> also why we don't even bother grab properly (if we don't get the grab
> within ten tries we just proceed without grabbing).

Nice to see you participate in this thread.

So the grabbing in the policykit authentication dialog is to prevent 
human error and not really for security!? In this case, I wonder whether 
the grabbing could not be made optional. (of course on by default)

For example the gksu authentication dialog has a gconf key that, from a 
user's perspective, seems to turn the modal dialog into a modeless 
dialog. (I don't know what really happens internaly.)



Disabling the pointer grabs in the authentication dialog of policykit 
might not be a nice solution, but it would at least make policykit 
accessible to user with alternative input methods like an onscreen 
keyboard.

Consequently as it can only be seen as a temporary workaround, I hope 
that this thread will bear some fruits for a cleaner more general 
solution. Maybe Daniel's idea about priorities...


Cheers

Francesco