Menu and button sounds do not play when assistive technologies are enabled

[kendell-clark]

On MATE Desktop, enabling “menu and button sounds” in the Sound Preferences works only when no assistive technology (AT) is active. When Orca (screen reader) or another AT is running, menu and button sounds are silent across GTK apps that normally emit libcanberra events.

Steps to reproduce:

Open MATE Sound Preferences → enable “Enable event sounds” / “Enable menu and button sounds”.

Launch Orca (or any AT that enables GTK accessibility).

Interact with menus or buttons in GTK apps that normally play sounds (e.g., Firefox).

Observe that no sounds are played.

Disable AT and repeat the same interaction — sounds play normally.

Expected behavior:
Menu and button sounds should play regardless of whether an assistive technology is active, consistent with the Sound Preferences checkbox.

Actual behavior:
Sounds are suppressed while AT is active.

Additional information:

GTK_MODULES=canberra-gtk-module works for apps like Firefox, confirming libcanberra is available and functional.

This issue appears specific to MATE Desktop + accessibility mode.

Likely related to how mate-settings-daemon interacts with toolkit-accessibility / AT-SPI.

Environment:

Fedora 43

[vkareh]

The session manager loads gail and atk-bridge when a11y is enabled, which means loading canberra externally seems to conflict somehow with internal MATE component.

Can you run this command:

gsettings set org.mate.SettingsDaemon.plugins.xsettings overrides "{'Gtk/Modules': <'gail:atk-bridge:canberra-gtk-module'>}"

and restart to verify whether it works?

If it does, that may be a good workaround, but also we could change the session manager to also load canberra (it would take a bit more memory if you have a11y enabled but no window sounds, but it's probably negligible)