This forum has been archived. All content is frozen. Please use KDE Discuss instead.

On-screen keyboard for accessibility, especially in Wayland

0

Votes
0
0
Tags: None
(comma "," separated)
bluewizard
Registered Member
Posts
1
Karma
0
Some users (e.g. with some disabilities) need a proper on-screen keyboard, like on Windows.
it needs to work everywhere like a normal keyboard and be available all the time (on top of all apps), not just when focused on a text field, for example to be able to send some hotkeys to an app.
Also for some users input method customization may be needed, such as hovering instead of clicking.

Image Image

In X11 there are such keyboards, like Florence and Onboard, but they are all broken on Wayland (tested in Plasma 5.23.3, Arch/EndeavourOS).

Florence crashes on start.
Onboard does not send anything to all apps I tried.
xvkbd works in Firefox, but not in KDE apps like Konsole or the search in Dolphin.

There is support for virtual keyboards in Plasma Input Method settings, so i tried Maliit like suggested here https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/wi ... l-Keyboard , but it worked only for text fields, had ridiculously large size on my 1440p monitor, no keys like arrows and F1-F12, and did not work in Firefox. Also it works a bit weird, when entering text in Konsole the text is shown like selected and disappears if I click with mouse in the Konsole.

And even in X11 there is no built-in on-screen keyboard in Plasma. GNOME at least provides a Maliit-like keyboard that can be enabled in the accessibility settings.
Installing a third-party on-screen keyboard without having any built-in keyboard can be very difficult or impossible for users with some disabilities or non-working physical keyboard.


Bookmarks



Who is online

Registered users: Bing [Bot], gfielding, Google [Bot], Sogou [Bot]