Kenno’s OpenNote

Remove Universal Access Preference icon from Gnome panel

Posted in Debian, Unix/Linux by kenno on June 23, 2009

One of the advantages of using GNU/Linux operating system is that you hardly have to restart it. I have Debian on my laptop and it’s been running for months, until last night. It crashed and froze. Anyway, that’s not the main point this post was written.

After restarting, I saw this new icon in the Gnome top panel (the third icon from the right):

universal_preference

Well, for the start, I don’t know what it is and I don’t think I will have a need for it either. So I wanted to remove it, but right click on this icon would do nothing. Left clicked on it would give me some setting option, but nowhere does it mention how to remove it.

Thanks to the tip from Ubutu Forum, someone has found a solution. Basically, you need to go the “Keyboard Preferences” and untick the “Accessibility features can be toggled  with keyboard shortcuts“.

The following is the step by step guide:

On Debian, from the menu panel, click on System -> Preferences -> Keyboard (alternatively, you can just type gnome-keyboard-properties from the Terminal)

Screenshot-Keyboard Preferences

Then, untick or uncheck the Accessibility features can be toggled  with keyboard shortcuts and click on Close button. The undesired icon shall disappear.

Credit: How to remove universal access from notification area

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9 comments

9 Responses

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  1. jpg said, on July 7, 2009 at 4:30 pm

    The same thing had happened to me and I didn’t know how to get rid of the icon. Very useful! Thanks.

    Reply
  2. Ronald said, on July 9, 2009 at 9:57 pm

    Thanks for posting this. Worked like a charm.

    Reply
  3. kenno said, on July 9, 2009 at 11:52 pm

    I wish there were an option we could just turn it off or remove it by right clicking on the icon.

    Reply
  4. Kamil said, on July 14, 2009 at 7:59 am

    Thank you very much ;)

    Reply
  5. Nick said, on July 14, 2009 at 1:13 pm

    Thanks!

    Reply
  6. jpablo said, on August 10, 2009 at 7:51 pm

    thanks men, that icon was making me mad n_n

    Reply
    • Kenno said, on August 11, 2009 at 4:15 am

      You’re welcome. It didn’t make me mad though. It just annoyed me for the fact that I didn’t use it.

      Reply
  7. guillaume said, on August 12, 2009 at 10:04 am

    Thanks ! It’s at least a bad interface design ( should right click to submenu, then offer to quit ) at most a bug.

    I’d never have found it by myself ^^

    Reply
  8. Johnny said, on September 15, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    This really helped!

    Reply

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