I am a differently abled person and I use the computer thanks to a chin joystick and thanks to the on screen keyboards, since the arrival of Wayland the keyboards and no longer work and for me it has become a huge problem, sure still I could use X11 but since The standard is going more and more to the other engine how can I make me use Linux without an on screen keyboard?
I fully understand that this is about security but if you wanted you could also put an option where the user chooses if he wants paranoid security, medium security or no security at all… to the status quo I have to say with huge sadness in my heart that Windows remains much more accessible than Linux and honestly I would never want to go back to the window system for anything in the world !
Hi, I use kde plasma 6 and wayland on a touch screen device and I have a on-sceen keyboard (but I don’t have youre usage).
Altough it is not the same virtual keyboards under X and wayland. On wayland the only on-screen keyboard is maliit you may have to install it and I think it is in the repo. There are some limitations maliit is not very active I think, It is not really customisable and there are no Ctrl and Alt and F1-F12 key.
I’m afraid that for the moment, accessibility is quite lacking on wayland, but hopefully with GNOME’s Newton project, as well as development moving away from the “get stuff ported” stage of the dev process, that we’ll start to see better accessibility on wayland. Hope this helps!
Excluding gnome’s OSK which has its major limitations, all others are either mobile or tablet keyboards anyway that are difficult to install and often give errors during the latter process
Right now I’m under Arch, under X I’ve always used onboard and I have to say I’ve always found it good also because of the snippets you can put inside it very useful
I’m sorry to revive an old thread but its actually really rough how hard you guys keep pushing wayland and we still don’t have a way to easily use the ctrl and alt keys.
This is terrible not just for tablets but accessibility in general.
I’m pretty disgusted with Waylands disregard for accessibility, from the beginning it was obvious that Wayland’s design prioritised security as something that must be “baked in” from the beginning and not “hacked on” later on, but for some reason the same does not apply to accessibility.
The design of Wayland means that users who require assistant applications for interaction are inherently disadvantaged as Wayland’s design explicitly forbids synthetic keyboard and mouse input and interrogating the contents of the screen.
This means that instead, we are reliant on non standard extensions to the Wayland protocol that differ with each implementation, and “toolkit-level” support for things like mouse and keyboard input, screen magnification and narration, etc.
Not only does this increase the amount and duplication of effort required to support these things, it also makes the tools to do it less generic and able to be used across desktop environments. It makes it very likely that a wxWindows based application won’t work with accessibility tools on a Gtk based desktop.
These are the sort of trivial details that we as users should not have to give a rodents nether region about. The bad news is that there is no good news. X11 is going away and Wayland is unfit for purpose more than a decade after its inception, despite people like me pointing out these inadequacies from the start.
Differently abled people are not welcome in Linux anymore,
For this very reason I am considering a return to Windows as much as it pains me, but in the name of security we differently abled people see left behind as usual by everyone
I like to think that KDE is even more secure than GNOME and therefore fundamentally even more inaccessible. Even querying various artificial intelligences one cannot find a decent complete OSK for KDE. Having said that, it is very interesting to observe the issue that open source is becoming more and more inaccessible for people with disabilities, whereas proprietary systems paradoxically look very much at accessibility. I can’t say why this tendency exists, on the contrary. Of course, to be a bit mean, one might think that with the arrival of Wayland and thus better security, they want to keep Linux at the starting level, i.e. at the time when it was an operating system for the chosen few.
The virtual keyboard situation is pretty bad, yeah. We’re all aware of it internally, and are brainstorming solutions for it. This is part of the Input goal; see KDE's Goals - KDE Community.
Sorry I can’t offer anything more than “we know it sucks and want to fix it”. Folks will just have to be patient for the time being.
Let’s say that already hearing these words reopens some hope. If by chance you want some help, I’m at your disposal, I don’t know how to plan, but I know what has to be there and how it has to be, maybe it’s too idiotic. But I am there.
I’m not trying to be like, impolite and/or angry but its frustrating when the best virtual keyboard I’ve used thus far is the one bundled with Steam.
Personally I can tell you that on X11 the best keyboard I used was Onboard. After that I used GJS-OSK up to Gnome 46 and I would love to be able to touch on KDE but unfortunately I don’t have a keyboard so I can’t use the system at all and that’s a real problem for me because I use the computer with a pointer of course then there are the voice programs but they make mistakes and so if you can’t correct it’s a big trouble.
Did you ever run Squeekboard on Plasma? I tried it on Plasma and Plasma mobile and it didnt show as an option in the settings and I got an error message “the app has stopped working” or something
It seems really quite obvious imho. Though I am neither a FOSS developer nor disabled so take it with a grain of salt.
In open source projects most developers are unpaid volunteers. They choose what to contribute and how much to contribute. So a lot of people work on the software that they use and they implement stuff that they want or need.
That works for most aspects of open source software, but it completely falls apart when it comes to accessibility, because the people who need accessibility tools cannot simply contribute them. The accessibility tools would already need to exist for the people that need them to possibly contribute to them.
The issue is not just a lack of incentive, I think it’s also that FOSS devs know how the stuff that they implement should work, because they use the stuff.
That can in some aspects lead to better outcomes than in the proprietary / corporate space where things may be done by someone who does not use the stuff and has no first hand experience with or knowledge about it - their efforts are instead guided by second-hand information that their employer aquired at significant cost.
But it falls apart when it comes to accessibility. There the FOSS space is at the same disadvantage of not having first hand experience and knowledge. But FOSS communities, let alone individual FOSS volunteers, do not have the resources to aquire the same level of second hand information. They can’t just hire a team of researchers and pay disabled people to advise on and test their stuff.
For my part, I can tell you that I have always offered my complete knowledge in this field, being a disabled person and a psychologist working on the digital issue and therefore also on innovation and accessibility. And I have always done this totally free of charge, but no one has ever needed my expertise, unfortunately.