Comment 9 for bug 479878

@ #8:

I full-heartily disagree with what you say. The reason why you would want to disable the touchpad is because you have some other means of interacting with the pointer. Fact of the matter is that some people (myself included) tend to put their hands on top of the touch pad from time to time which results in unwanted pointer movement. Since this can be very annoying these people find other ways of interacting with the pointer. Personally I use a track-point; others may connect an ordinary mouse (try counting the number of people using ordinary mouses with their laptops and you will see that many people really don't like the touch pad). For these people the touch pad serves no other purpose than being highly distractive. For this reason it should be possible to completely disable the touch pad (it might be sensible to warn the user when doing this, but that is another matter).

As another example think of a blind or visually impaired user that does not use a mouse at all. Now, remember that even on default installs focus is actually dependent on the mouse. If you do not allow people to completely disable the touch pad then the result will be that visually impaired users will have a mouse moving all over the place, changing focus with out them knowing (I've seen this happen).

Now you may say, that it is fine just to disable the touch pad when the user is typing. I disagree. First of all, such measures are only heuristics and will never be perfect all the time. Second of all, the keyboard serves at least two purposes. One is typing another is wresting your arms. People have their hand on the keyboard even when they are not typing, meaning the cursor might move simply because they are resting their arms.

In summary: I disagree.