[Fwd: Re: [accessibility-discuss] Accessibility helpers & Xinput2/Xevie/Xorg]

[Joanmarie Diggs <joanmarie diggs gmail com>]

Hey all.

Forwarding attempt redux. :-)

I mentioned in the weekly a11y meeting that this would be a good message
to respond to, and everyone was like, "Message, what message?". Sure
enough, it's not showing up in the gnome-accessibility-list archives
either. The only reason I saw it must be due to being on the two
OpenSolaris lists. <shrugs>

I wish I knew the answer to Alan's questions, but that's not my area of
expertise....

Take care.
--joanie

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Peter Korn <peter korn oracle com>
To: Alan Coopersmith <alan coopersmith oracle com>
Cc: OpenSolaris X Window System List <xwin-discuss opensolaris org>,
gnome-accessibility-list gnome org,
accessibility-discuss opensolaris org
Subject: Re: [accessibility-discuss] Accessibility helpers &
Xinput2/Xevie/Xorg
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:58:27 -0700

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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