Unity Greeter is not accessible to illiterate / preschool users

[Andrew Oakley]

Hi, I my eldest daughter was brought up on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. She was given her own account from around the age of three and logged in (passwordless) by clicking on her photo, since at the time she could not yet read.

My toddler twins will be three next week. I have upgraded to 12.04 LTS and it would appear that the replacement for GDM, the Unity Greeter, does not support user pictures/photos. The user has to be able to read their user name to log in.

This omission makes the Unity Greeter inaccessible to preschool / kindergarten users, and other illiterate users such as adults with learning difficulties (mental handicaps). They can't distinguish their user account from other user accounts.

It also breaks established functionality from the previous LTS release. From a preschooler's point of view, they used to be able to login to Ubuntu, and now they can't. That's a bug in Ubuntu.

I am aware that Unity Greeter is not new in 12.04, however 12.04 is an LTS release, I *only* install LTS releases, so this came as an unwelcome surprise to me.

The requirement to click "login" after selecting a user account is probably less of a problem (although I nevertheless do consider it a problem).

(In case you're wondering what a preschooler does with Ubuntu, after login my children are presented with a highly simplistic OpenBox interface with a selection of desktop icons for Tux Paint, Tux Racer, Cheese, BBC CBeebies website etc. They are, of course, supervised during use, but this break in functionality between 10.04 and 12.04 massively reduces the fostering of a spirit of independent learning, exploration and play.)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Stephan Springer (geryon)]

See also bug #1002349.

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I'm marking this a duplicate of bug 1002349 since that's already a request to show user pictures in unity-greeter.