Ways to activate virtual onscreen keyboard in gnome-kiosk mode

Applications
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How to activate virtual onscreen keyboard

Hi,

i am working to realise eight identical machines which run a kiosk, for our public organization (FabLab). The system is a setup, consisting of an Raspberry Pi 4, an attached touch screen and thats it. I installed gnome-kiosk to auto-launch firefox with predefined tabs, working well. Now i am trying to activate onscreen keyboard, because physically there is no hardware to input keys data. I did not find some understable information how to do this by using virtual OSK. I am “only” an admistrator, not a gnome session nerd yet. I was looking google search results up and down x times, did not find anyone who did this. Can you maybe help me out? In your readme you write there is a possiblity to get onscreen keyboard maybe

i already messed around with GitHub - nick-shmyrev/improved-osk-gnome-ext: Improved On Screen Keyboard for Gnome Shell which works in regular gnome sessions (not the kiosk script session). i edited vim /usr/share/dconf/profile/gnomekiosk to add system-db:local as this local system db already contains information about the “improved osk gnome ext”, but it does not get activated

similar requests i found at:

and some general info about, i found at: Configure single-application mode

thank you really much, Mario

note: this is related to the request i opened at gitlab.gnome. org/GNOME/gnome-kiosk/-/issues/16 first, but it was closed.

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There is no OSK in gnome-kiosk. The OSK in gnome-shell is part of gnome-shell itself, but gnome-shell is not used by gnome-kiosk.

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there is a plan to add an onscreen keyboard, i just haven’t done it yet.

There are a number of firefox on-screen keyboard extensions. you can probably use one of those in the mean time ?

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Hi Ray,
thanks for your reply. Indeed i already installed a Firefox OSK. There are not so many out there, which work well or are recent enough (in terms of good maintenance). But i used to install FX OSK DE (fixed) – Holen Sie sich diese Erweiterung für 🦊 Firefox (de). This is quite useful, but has a large caveat. As it seems there is no OSK for Firefox outside which is able to take control over input firefox control fields like the ctrl +f search in page, native search bar or url address bar. That means you can only use the OSK for “inside the” rendered web pages, which have regular forms. Every time you enter focus in such input field, the keyboard works well. But as we cannot change urls, its quite hard to use as some self service kiosk. Thats the clear argument for a native OSK gnome keyboard requirement.

i also played around with other OSK like squeekboard, maliit, florence to make it work in gnome-kiosk, but i was not able to solve it yet

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