Some blind people use a kernel engine called Speakup which uses hardware
synthesis to speak what gets displayed on the screen. They use the
PC keyboard to control this engine (start/stop, accelerate, ...) and
also need to get keyboard feedback (to make sure to know what they are
typing, the caps lock status, etc.)
Up to now, the way it was done was very ugly. Below is a patch to add a
notifier list for permitting a far better implementation, see ChangeLog
above for details.
You may wonder why this can't be done at the input layer. The problem
is that what people want to monitor is the console keyboard, i.e. all
input keyboards that got attached to the console, and with the currently
active keymap (i.e. keysyms, not only keycodes).
This adds a keyboard notifier that such modules can use to get the keyboard
events and possibly eat them, at several stages:
- keycodes: even before translation into keysym.
- unbound keycodes: when no keysym is bound.
- unicode: when the keycode would get translated into a unicode character.
- keysym: when the keycode would get translated into a keysym.
- post_keysym: after the keysym got interpreted, so as to see the result
(caps lock, etc.)
This also provides access to k_handler so as to permit simulation of
keypresses.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: various fixes]
Signed-off-by: Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>
Cc: Jiri Kosina <jkosina@suse.cz>
Cc: Dmitry Torokhov <dtor@mail.ru>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
