Re: [g-a-devel] Cross desktop environment event capture for assistive technologies.

[Luke Yelavich <luke yelavich canonical com>]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2016 at 10:31:19PM AEDT, Alejandro Piñeiro wrote:
> Yes, the same applies for Wayland. It is one of our oldest TODOs. We
> even had some email threads about the topic on wayland-dev some years
> ago, without too much success. The thing is that they are open to
> discuss it, but they didn't give too much hints about how to implement
> it, and we should be the ones doing it.
>
> FWIW, the issue is not only about snoop input events, but also about
> synthesize input events.

Yes, I am aware of that, and forgot to mention it.

> Yes, the first step, as far as I remember the chats, would be solving it
> first on the compositor. For Wayland-GNOME, would be gnome-shell.

This is what I was thinking. You mention going via at-spi. Are you referring 
to the registry daemon itself, or are you referring to libatspi only?

I was thinking that it doesn't make sense for the registry daemon to deal 
with input event capture and synthesizing input events. As such, my thought 
was to change libatspi to work with the shell/compositor directly, bypassing 
one level of indirection, and reducing the amount of back and forth IPC 
required. Of course for pure X environments things would stay as they are.

Ok reading your reply again, you stated reusing the at-spi API, which I agree 
with, but as above, I do think the registry daemon shouldn't be needed in the 
longer term, and libatspi should deal with the shells itself.

> Finally, other place to take a look to are screen on keyboards. They
> face similar problems, and I bet that there are Mir-based platforms with
> some kind of screen on keyboard (Ubuntu Touch?)

Ubuntu touch uses Maliit as the keyboard framework, and I think it uses Qt in 
some way to directly inject keyboard events, and may support other systems as 
well, my understanding is not that great for this.

Thanks to Chris as well, both of you have provided a bit more reading 
material which I will have a look over.

Luke