Bug #14763

It should be possible to turn off the on-screen keyboard if desired

Added by goupille 2017-10-03 12:18:31 . Updated 2017-11-10 17:04:50 .

Status:
Resolved
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
intrigeri
Category:
Hardware support
Target version:
Start date:
2017-10-03
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Feature Branch:
Type of work:
Research
Blueprint:

Starter:
Affected tool:
On-screen keyboard
Deliverable for:

Description

a anonymous user reported that on a Acer Aspire V3 with a touchscreen and a broken trackpad, the on-screen keyboard kept popping up (i assume whenever the user touched the screen on an “writable” window) even though the on-screen keyboard was not turned on by the user. apparently, turning it off does not work.

I assume that gnome is detecting the touchscreen and turn on the on-screen keyboard in case the hardware doesn’t have a physical keyboard available (like a tablet). It should be at least possible to disable the on-screen keyboard, or Gnome should search for a physical keyboard before turning on the on-screen keyboard.

like I said, the user was anonymous, and did not gave us further information

Subtasks

Related issues

Blocks Tails - Feature #13244: Core work 2017Q4: Foundations Team Resolved 2017-06-29

History

#1 Updated by intrigeri 2017-10-29 07:48:49

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2017-10-29 07:49:12

  • Status changed from New to Confirmed

#3 Updated by intrigeri 2017-10-29 07:54:46

  • Category set to Hardware support

goupille wrote:
> a anonymous user reported that on a Acer Aspire V3 with a touchscreen and a broken trackpad, the on-screen keyboard kept popping up (i assume whenever the user touched the screen on an “writable” window) even though the on-screen keyboard was not turned on by the user.

Too bad we have to rely on guesses here. Thankfully I can test this myself on a system with a touchscreen (but it’ll be on sid, not on Tails as this laptop needs a ChromeOS kernel).

> I assume that gnome is detecting the touchscreen and turn on the on-screen keyboard in case the hardware doesn’t have a physical keyboard available (like a tablet).

Right. At least current GNOME in sid does even better: it enables the on-screen keyboard when one uses the touchscreen or when a convertible laptop is switched to tablet mode. Both seem sensible heuristics to me.

> It should be at least possible to disable the on-screen keyboard,

I’ll look into it. Given the default behavior totally makes sense to me, and the requested customization is only needed in a corner case (broken trackpad), I will treat this with rather low-priority though.

> or Gnome should search for a physical keyboard before turning on the on-screen keyboard.

It does. But when one starts using the touchscreen, GNOME asumes one wants to also use it for typing, which feels like a reasonable default behavior to me.

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2017-10-29 07:54:56

#5 Updated by intrigeri 2017-11-10 17:04:50

  • Status changed from Confirmed to Resolved

I can reproduce this behaviour, as expected, on Debian sid with the “Screen Keyboard” accessibility option disabled: once I use the touchscreen to click around, and then select a text entry area, GNOME (correctly) guesses I want to keep using the touchscreen and opens the on-screen keyboard. As soon as I type on the hardware keyboard, the on-screen keyboard disappears, which seems exactly what should happen. So far, so good.

Now, regarding how to prevent the on-screen keyboard from popping-up even when one is actively using the touchscreen:

So I’m closing this bug as I don’t see what we can do about it at the moment. If this causes trouble for more users, let me know and we can reconsider. And (half-joking) it might be cheaper to send a free external mouse to every affected user than to spend hours of engineering work fixing this rare bug ;)

Interestingly, on Windows it seems the only way to achieve what the bug reporter’s broken hardware needs is to stop & disable the on-screen keyboard service in the services manager (or whatever it’s called), i.e. pretty hackish.