Alan,
I'm cc-ing the GNOME Accessibility list, where folks who are interested
in this live.
The GNOME On-screen Keyboard is being replaced with Caribou (see
http://live.gnome.org/Caribou). There remains a need for a way for
alternate input devices (which electrically look like mice, and which
present the USB mouse HID) to connect to a UNIX desktop and drive
accessibility software like Caribou. Various workarounds (e.g. moving
the mouse to the upper left corner - assuming the keyboard lives there)
make this non-critical, but still important.
I don't know enough about Xi2 to say whether that meets all needs or
not. Perhaps the Caribou maintainer might comment. One concern though
is whether Xi2 is a good path forward for thin clients like Sun Ray, or
whether we need to use something like libusb for that.
Regards,
Peter Korn
Accessibility Principal,
Oracle
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.)
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