lightdm fails keyboard accessability design

[Paul Crawford]

Following on from the issue of bug #986289 to more general issue about the design of the unity greeter and how a person, in particular a newer user, with only keyboard-like access can make proper use of the computer.

There is an underlying issue of poor "discoverability" here and it fails, in my view, to be acceptable for a disabled user:

(1) Why does the tab key not cycle to the other menus? Where exactly will a user, faced with the log-in screen, find out that the 'F10' key opens the shutdown menu?

(2) The tab key only cycles between the log-in desktop (e.g. Gnome, Unity, etc, and not the user list) and the entry window for the current account's password.

The up & down arrow keys cycle the user accounts (which is no that obvious but I found out by trying most keys until something happened), but they do not cycle the desktop choice. For that you need to make further use the tab key!

Why the lack of consistency?

(3) Having found that 'F10' will open the shutdown drop-down menu, what keys allow access to the accessibility drop-down menu on the top bar?

(4) Same for the drop-down selector for keyboard/language?

(5) How is a user expected to get help on this? The de-facto standard 'F1' brings up nothing, and there is no textual indication on the display to show, for example, that using 'F10' brings up the shutdown menu.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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