[Kde-accessibility] Keyboard status applet

[Bill Haneman]

Gunnar Schmi Dt wrote:

>>And how about also Scroll Lock, Insert, and whether sticky keys etc. is 
>>on?

I would agree with Gunnar that Scroll Lock, Insert, etc. aren't modifier 
keys in the usual sense.  Also, most keyboards have LEDs to indicate the 
state of Scroll Lock, etc.  There are some other utilities out there 
that will display the status of such keys, for keyboards which lack the 
LEDs.

As for sound - XKB already provides (optional) audio feedback when keys 
are latched/locked, so the KDE applet's sound feature should be optional 
so as not to clash with the XKB-provided sounds.  The XKB sounds are 
pretty primitive, just beeps of various sorts, so the ability to provide 
custom sounds is a nice feature.

> Currently the default configuration for KNotify is off for the Shift, 
> Control, Alt and Alt Graph keys and on for the Num Lock and Caps Lock 
> keys. As I said you can change this in the "Sounds&Notification" KCM.

It would be better to ask the XKB extension about which modifier keys 
are available on the current keyboard.  We do this by calling 
XkbKeysymToModifiers for keysyms like XK_Alt_L, XK_Alt_R, XK_Super_L, 
etc. - if XkbKeysymToModifiers returns 0 for a keysym, we infer that the 
keysym isn't available in the current keymap.  See 
accessx_status_applet_initmodifiers in 
gnome-applets/accessx-status/applet.c.

> [1]: As it was not really clear to me which images should be used together 
> with which key, I used images that are similar to the images of the GNOME 
> AccessX applet. Only the image for "Alt Graph" is not specified in the 
> source of the GNOME applet, but rather it loads a "localized icon" for 
> that key. As I have no idea what such a "localized icon" looks like (and I 
> currently do not have a recent GNOME available to look at), I took the 
> image for the meta key instead. Maybe we should change this to something 
> similar to what GNOME uses for that key?

What we (GNOME) use now is actually the "ae" digraph, at least in 
english locales.  Ideally it should be an "easily recognized alternative 
glyph" of the sort one would get from AltGraph + (a common letter).

Another very useful feature which would be nice to include in your KDE 
applet is feedback on "SlowKeys" status, i.e. whether a key has been 
accepted or rejected, and whether an initial press event has taken place 
or not.  In GNOME we use a "clock dial" type icon when SlowKeys is 
active, which changes when a key is pressed to display the glyph 
associated with the key, and then changes to show "accepted" or 
"rejected" when the key is either accepted or a premature key release 
takes place.

- Bill

> Gunnar Schmi Dt
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> kde-accessibility mailing list
> kde-accessibility at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-accessibility


-- 
------
Bill Haneman
Gnome Accessibility Project
Sun Microsystems Ireland