Comment 48 for bug 996801

I was also bitten by this since I upgraded my Debian install to Wheezy, which means something happened between Xorg 7.5 and 7.7.

I do not use gnome, I do not use KDE, in fact I do not consider I use a "desktop environment" most of the time, the main exception being "gnome-settings" that is started during my session. I notable have *disabled* the slow keys shortcut in gnome-settings, so I do not expect this to happen at all. I can confirm, however, that the following workaround works:

    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.a11y.keyboard enable false

... but only if you are running "gnome-settings". Oh, and this bug manifests itself in non-GNOME sessions only if you run GDM, which enables accessibility features before your X session starts.

I can also note that I cannot reproduce this with a USB keyboard, which seems at the very least inconsistent.

I can also corroborate with other reports of this being triggered randomly, that is: I did not hold the shift key for 10 seconds - but maybe a serie of different keys were held down in a total of 10 seconds.

As others here, I have thought that my keyboard was broken. I had to reboot my laptop a few times until a friend that was sitting next to me explained what happened. The fact that a line is now written in Xorg.0.log is useful, but will *never* be useful to most of the users out there - in fact I never thought of looking there until I found this bug report.

I do not understand why this feature is there, or how i can be considered an "accessibility" feature. From my point of view, it makes the whole graphical interface a lot *less* usable, as it means that, without any explanation, your laptop's keyboard may stop working completely. I would like to understand what purpose it serves and while I do not object to the feature being present, I'd like to be able to turn this thing off, at the very least.