Years ago, we created the Xevie extension [1] to support the needs
of accessibility helpers such as gok that needed to intercept and
modify input events before they were delivered to clients.   However
it got broken a few years ago in Xorg upstream, and was finally removed
in 2008 when the MultiPointer X support integrated.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XEvIE

We'd also done work in the past to document how to set up multiple
pointer devices (or at least make the core pointer not controlled
directly by hardware, and have the hardware drive a X input extension
device) so that the mouse (or mouse-emulating device) drove gok, and
gok in turn drove the core pointer.   All the changes around X Input 2.0
should make this cleaner, simpler, and client controllable, so that gok
or similar technology can disassociate a physical device from the core
pointer without requiring X server configuration changes.   (This is a good
thing, since the old instructions based on xorg.conf won't work in recent
builds, since input device configuration moved to HAL in Xorg 1.4, but may
work again after we move to Xorg 1.8 and finish the port off of HAL.)

With all that, we're wondering what the current state of accessibility
and input devices is, and if there's work we need to be doing, either
in the Solaris/OpenSolaris implementation, or pushing upstream at X.Org.

Is there still a need for Xevie?   Does Xi2 deliver everything accessibility
helpers need?   Do we need to document the new input configuration world or
just work to get the helpers to do the right thing from the client side?
Is there anything else we need to be doing in the X level

(Hopefully general needs get communicated from the GNOME Accessibility
 community upstream to the X.Org community upstream, but since many of
 the people involved with these issues upstream are also here, we can
 talk about both our platform-specific issues and the bigger picture.)

-- 
        -Alan Coopersmith-        [email protected]
         Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System

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