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):
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)
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
Kenno's openNOTE 
The same thing had happened to me and I didn’t know how to get rid of the icon. Very useful! Thanks.
Thanks for posting this. Worked like a charm.
I wish there were an option we could just turn it off or remove it by right clicking on the icon.
Thank you very much 😉
Thanks!
thanks men, that icon was making me mad n_n
You’re welcome. It didn’t make me mad though. It just annoyed me for the fact that I didn’t use it.
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 ^^
This really helped!
Thanks, it was driving me crazy 🙂
TYVM!!!! XD i was goin nuts on why it was there XD
Great tip, thanks 🙂
This was driving me crazy, thank you!
Very cool tip friend thank you :))!
For the love of God! Thank you! That icon was so annoying, and was using space on my panel.
Thank God for that..
Thanks a lot for the tip! At last I got rid of that annoying thing. 🙂
Thanks, now help me remove that “Network Connection” icon. Not that I’m against Networks, you understand–it’s just an eye-sore.
Which distro are you running? If you run Debian/Ubuntu, you can try to remove this package: network-manager-gnome. I haven’t tried this myself, so be warned that your computer may not connect to the network after removing this package.
Thanks man… you saved my day… Ugly icon. 🙂
Running on FreeBSD 8.2. 🙂
Big thanks for that post.
Very useful.
Thank you, very useful information. I used this information in my own blog… obviously giving you the credit.
Sweet!
Thank you so much this finally helped me to get rid of this icon.
I even think it made my keyboard crash all the time.
Thanks for the help. BTW, your post is the first result when searching Google for “gnome universal access preferences”.
I used your note to fix my centos 6.4. Thanks.