[Accessibility] Capslock with Orca

Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org
Tue May 12 23:40:13 CEST 2020


Hello,

In the laptop layout, Orca uses capslock as the key for forming
navigation shortcuts. It thus has to disable the behavior of capslock
inside xkb. It however reacts to a double-press on the orca key to
trigger the capslock behavior through XkbLockModifiers. To determine
whether it should enable or disable the capslock behavior, Orca looks at
the capslock modifier of the capslock key events (since other
applications might be tampering with the state of the capslock
modifier).

However, qtbase does not set the capslock modifier state in its key
events :/

More precisely, in QSpiApplicationAdaptor::eventFilter, the
ATSPI_MODIFIER_SHIFTLOCK flag (actually capslock modifier) only set when
the capslock *key* is kept pressed, not when the capslock modifier is
enabled. Indeed, while the state of the other modifiers show up in
keyEvent->modifiers, there is no such thing in Qt for the capslock
modifier (enum KeyboardModifier does not contain capslock, only shift,
control, alt, meta).

This means that when pressing double-capslock in a Qt application, Orca
enables capslock, and when pressing double-capslock again, Orca still
thinks that capslock is not enabled (since the capslock key events don't
have the capslock modifier flag set), and enables capslock again instead
of disabling it.

Fixing this in Qt would comprise:

- adding CapslockModifier to enum KeyboardModifier
- adding the test for XCB_MOD_MASK_LOCK to enable CapslockModifier
  appropriately in QXcbKeyboard::translateModifiers.

Would that work with Qt people?

Samuel


More information about the Accessibility mailing list