Comment 10 for bug 944159

I've pushed a workaround for this to quantal. It's not ideal, and not something I want to propose for upstreaming yet.

I think the real issue is that orca does not read the currently focused widget on startup. It only reads the current window. So in unity-greeter, it never "notices" that it's in a password prompt without a focus switch to wake it up. This looks like a bug to me, but maybe it's intentional. We have to talk to orca people.

We can poke orca into noticing the prompt. But orca never tells us when it's finished initializing, so we have to guess when to poke it. I've done it two ways: (1) wait a second after starting orca, then poke. Obviously racy. (2) Once the first key press happens after starting orca, poke. This is racy in a different way, in that orca might speak the first character entered before realizing it's in a password prompt. But at least the rest of the characters are hidden. And ideally, the first one-second-poke already solved it for us.

The real fix should be in orca. Either have it claim a bus name or have some way of signaling when it is ready to rock. Or just speak the current focused widget on startup.