[Kde-accessibility] Broken Sticky Keys (Bug 41778)

[Bill Haneman]

On Tue, 2002-10-22 at 23:17, David Parker wrote:
> First let me say thanks Bill for your research. I commited the sin of sending 
> an email in frustration. I apologize for the tone of my earlier message.

David:

When you complain below about "calling bugs features", bear in mind that
I am referring to XKB; XKB is an XServer extension, not an end-user
API.  Thus I stand confidently by my earlier comment.

However, failing to expose this feature in a reasonable way, or not
documenting this feature, both qualify as bugs in whatever keyboard
accessibility UI one offers.  (see a couple of comments below).

best regards,

Bill

> On Tuesday 22 October 2002 04:22 am, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > BY the way:
> >
> > The sticky keys behavior reported below is a "feature" of XKB; it has a
> > timeout after which it turns itself off.  It also can be configured to
> > turn itself off when two keys are pressed at the same time.
> 
> hmmm, can't adopt the M$ habits of calling bugs features... The way this 
> feature should work is not to timeout, but expose an interface where the 
> timeout can be enabled. Someone enabling sticky keys does so for a reason and 
> doesn't wish to have its functionality turned off. On a multi-user system, 
> where the settings are user specific, I doubt disabling the timeout is even 
> necessary, turn sticky keys on, leave it on. This is probably a holdover from 
> Windows 9x where all settings were system wide.

THis feature was expressly developed for shared systems, which are still
a reality in some applications (kiosks, etc., in some cases the same
login is shared).  XKB *does* expose this interface, but it sounds like
the system configuration you are using does not.

The feature can be either on or off, I don't recall the defaults.  But
it is useful in some cases.  Has absolutely nothing to do with the
Windows world IMHO.


> >
> > I _suspect_ that the issue here is exposing control of the timeout (and
> > disabling/enabling it), and exposing control over the "turn off when two
> > keys are pressed simultaneous" feature.
> >
> > Sorry I can't help investigate personally, I am real busy with the Gnome
> > Accessibility stuff ATM.
> >
> > There are some freeware command-line accessx control utilities that
> > would allow the user to set these things, one could experiment with one
> > of these utilities to see whether the XKB extension is working properly.
> >
> 
> I'll look into the freeware tools.

Right; they control the XKB extension, and thus are intended to be
end-user features, unlike XKB itself.

> 
> Thanks,
> David