Keyboard-Free accessibility of GTK

[Cedric Sodhi <manday gmx net>]

Hello,

does anyone have an opinion on how GTK can be made accessible to
keyboard-free input? Or should it not?

As a tablet user on LInux, I'm left with tricks and patching together
something that somehow works. A.t.m. I'm using Cellwriter which has a
try icon in Tint2 - every time I need to write something, I click the
tray Icon.

>From what I've gathered, Cellwriter's recognition provides a pluggable
API, I'm therefore planning to write my own virtual keyboard (for
Cellwriter's is less than rudimentary) and employ Cellwriter's
recognition API.

While this will hopefully yield a comfortable GTK onScreenKeyboard
(minimalistic and functional, compared to solutions such as onBoard), it
does not really solve the problem of how to invoke the tool.

Windows 7 has a good implementation of keyboard-free entry, imho.
Specifically, every input field, when accessed with either the pen or
the finger, pops-up a small link to open either the OSK or the
Handwriting-Recognizer (HWR).

I hoped, something similar would be possible for Gtk/GNOME - it will
have to be done sooner or later, tablets are taking a dominant market
share and Android is not always an option.

Similar to Windows, I thought, GTK could offer a tooltip-like link to
bring up an OSK or HWR, depending on by which Input Device the mouse is
currently moved.

So if you click with the mouse into a GtkEntry, nothing happens. If you
tap with the finger, a small icon allows you to bring up the OSK. If you
click with the pen, a small icon allows you to bring up the HWR.

Surely, this would have to be integral part of Gtk, would it not? I
could not imagine how something could "plug into" Gtk (without the means
of LD_PRELOAD or similar) do achieve that - it would instead have to be
integrated into Gtk's Code.

What about allowing a entry in /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini


OnScreenKeyboard = /usr/bin/cellwriter -k %x %y
HandwritingRecongizer = /usr/bin/cellwriter -h %x %y

which determines which tooltips-links (if any) start which application?
In detail (although this is just meant as a preliminary example), %x and
%y would be replaced by the position of the GtkEntry on-screen (so that
the OSK/HWR could place itsself next to the cursor). Other "parameters"
could aswell be possible, such as "%s" which would pass the current
value of the GtkEntry, etc.

It shouldn't be difficult to implement that in Gtk - after all, there is
only a limited number of GtkEditables.

Do you have any ideas, suggestions, or objections?

regards,
Cedric