There’s a museum near where I live, for which I’m pretty much the software guy: it has a couple of touchscreens for interactive exhibits, and except for one, they all run stuff I’ve cobbled together to meet the museum’s needs. The other one was supplied as-is by some or another part of the provincial government, to run an interactive history-type presentation. As far as I know, more of these screens, with the same software on it, were given to other museums and similar organisations.
The museum staff have long complained about this particular screen, because visitors often manage to break out of the presentation and get to the desktop of the Windows it runs on, and somebody then has to get it back to full screen again. I finally looked into it today, and though the fixes weren’t that hard, the whole setup was one big that makes me think nobody ever thought about what people may actually try to do with a touchscreen in a public place.
Let’s start from the first impression. The presentation was running in Internet Explorer; when I noted this, I was told it was supposed to run in Chrome (the museum staff member I was with, though fairly computer-savvy, doesn’t know enough about these sorts of things to fix them himself). It also wasn’t running in kiosk mode — I don’t know if IE can do that, but it certainly wasn’t, as its title bar and the Windows task bar were on screen. Great.
The touchscreen appears to have with its own on-screen keyboard software, which handily includes things like a key. The keyboard isn’t needed for the presentation at all, because as far as I can tell, there is no text entry in it at all. But the thing pops up if you tap the screen a certain way. It’s clear this is how people get out of the browser.
Starting up Chrome, I get a notice that it wasn’t the default browser, would I like to make it that? That could wait for later — let’s see how this presentation is actually set up first, since it doesn’t load when I open Chrome.
It turns out to be a directory full of subdirs and other stuff, with an index.html
that’s loaded locally. This directory is on the desktop — I’m told that the way the presentation is normally started, is to open the directory, double-click (double-tap?) on index.html
and manually put the browser into full-screen mode
Let’s solve that later as well — on to more important concerns first: what can people actually do on this machine once they get out of the web browser? A picture is worth a thousand words in this case:
Yes, it’s running in an administrator account with no password on it. When it was delivered to the museum, the man who brought it said the machine should be hooked up to the internet, else the presentation would lack some functionality. He received the reply that there was no way that was going to happen, because they most certainly didn’t want someone setting it to play porn or something. Apparently, this had not occurred to him (but he apparently also wasn’t much more than the guy told to drop it off).
My quick-fix consisted of first putting a password on the admin account, followed by making a new user with parental controls that disallow everything except Chrome. Then I moved the directory with the presentation to the My Documents directory of the locked-down account, set Chrome's start page to the index.html
file, put Chrome into the startup items of that account, and added the flag to run in kiosk mode.
That left only that pesky keyboard to contend with, that’s at the root of all this.
I’m not entirely sure it was supplied by the touchscreen software, but it wasn’t Windows’ own on-screen keyboard that you get from the Easy Access entry in the Start menu. The keyboard turned out to have an Options menu, which opened a window in which you can choose when it should appear; when I unchecked all of those, I couldn’t get it back on the screen. This is good, but also a nice bonus : if you provide an on-screen keyboard, it would be handy if there is some way in which it can be opened even if the automatic ways have been disabled …
The only thing I couldn’t work out, is how to disable secondary clicks (done on the touchscreen by pressing for a second or two). This still opens Chrome’s secondary-click menu, and gives access to the developer’s tools. That incidentally, also seemed to show the supposed lack in functionality from not being on the internet: 44 FILE_NOT_FOUND errors. However, all of them turned out to be for local files …