Pre-OS Accessibility Profile Replication via Embedded Controller
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Solution Overview
Problem
Information handling systems, particularly pre-operating system (pre-OS) user interfaces like BIOS configuration screens, lack accessibility features, making it difficult for visually impaired users to perform tasks such as diagnostics, remote flash updates, and system repairs.
Innovation Solution
The system extends accessibility features from the runtime operating environment to the pre-OS environment by capturing a runtime accessibility profile and replicating it in pre-OS environments, ensuring a consistent and seamless user experience across heterogeneous operating environments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If accessibility features are added to pre-OS interfaces, then accessibility for visually impaired users is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system captures the accessibility profile during the runtime operating environment phase, before the pre-OS environment is needed. This preliminary capture of accessibility settings allows the pre-OS interface to inherit these settings without having to generate them from scratch, thereby improving accessibility while minimizing the additional complexity required in the pre-OS environment.
Solution Approach 2:
The accessibility profile captured from the runtime environment is replicated and applied to the pre-OS environment. Instead of implementing separate accessibility features for pre-OS, the system copies the existing accessibility profile, ensuring consistency across environments while avoiding redundant implementation complexity.
2Stability of the object's composition
If accessibility profiles are captured and replicated across environments, then user experience consistency is improved, but information processing overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the necessary accessibility profile information from the runtime environment and transfers it to the pre-OS environment. By taking out only the relevant accessibility settings rather than copying entire configuration sets, the system maintains user experience consistency while minimizing information processing overhead.
3Ease of repair
If pre-OS interfaces support accessibility features, then ease of repair and diagnostics is improved, but manufacturing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The accessibility profile mechanism serves multiple functions: it enables accessibility in both runtime and pre-OS environments, ensures user experience consistency, and simplifies firmware development by using a universal profile approach. This multi-functionality improves ease of repair and diagnostics while avoiding the need for separate accessibility implementations, thereby reducing manufacturing complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
An operating system (OS) software service detects an accessibility change event and takes a snapshot of the accessibility settings before sending and receiving memory-mapped input/output (MMIO) commands with an embedded controller (EC) to establish trust using existing security hardening methods. The software service may send an MMIO command that includes the profile as a payload to the EC. The EC extracts the profile payload and saves it to an NVRAM variable before signaling a basic input/output system (BIOS) during early boot of an available accessibility profile. The EC publishes an accessibility profile presence to a BIOS pre-EFI initialization (PEI) layer, which sends a command to the EC to return the response. The BIOS creates a new hand off block (HOB) command indicative of the accessibility profile and passes this to an early Driver Execution Environment (DXE) stage, which reads the HOB data and locates the accessibility layer within a serial peripheral interface (SPI) firmware volume and loads into memory. This extracted profile information is passed onto the accessibility layer, which applies the profile data to user interface (UI) control attributes.