Features/Onscreen Keyboard

Summary

An on-screen keyboard for Sugar, targeted primarily at tablet like devices (which have no physical keyboards).

Owner

This should link to your home wiki page so we know who you are

• Name: Sayamindu

• Email: sayamindu@sugarlabs.org

Current status

• Targeted release: N/A
• Last updated: 06/29/2010
• Percentage of completion: 10%

Detailed Description

With OLPC announcing the XO-3 tablet, and with hardware like the JooJoo tablet, Sugar should become better suited for touch-based, physical keyboard-less devices. The on-screen keyboard feature aims to provide one such functionality. On-screen keyboards are also important for certain accessibility related contexts, but use cases like that are better handled by specialized software like Features/Accessibility_virtualkeyboard.

Software

While a number of FOSS on-screen keyboard software exists, the initial experiments are being carried out with fvkbd (Free Virtual KeyBoarD). The advantages of fvkbd include:

• Minimal external dependency outside the Sugar platform (only libfakekey is required as an extra)
• Actively maintained
• Internationalization friendly
• Has a library providing most of functionality which can be used later via Python bindings/introspection to achieve tighter integration with Sugar

Benefit to Sugar

A virtual/on-screen keyboard is probably the first component people think about when it comes to Sugar on a tablet device like the XO-3. It can be seen as a stepping stone for making Sugar more tablet-friendly and is essential for easily debugging and developing Sugar on a tablet machine.

UI Design

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How To Test

Features/Onscreen Keyboard/Testing

User Experience

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Dependencies

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Contingency Plan

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Documentation

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Release Notes

The Sugar Release Notes inform end-users about what is new in the release. An Example is 0.84/Notes. The release notes also help users know how to deal with platform changes such as ABIs/APIs, configuration or data file formats, or upgrade concerns. If there are any such changes involved in this feature, indicate them here. You can also link to upstream documentation if it satisfies this need. This information forms the basis of the release notes edited by the release team and shipped with the release.

Comments and Discussion

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