Incorrect description for activation of new on-screen keyboard with Gnome 3.28 (Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS) and 3.30 (Ubuntu Cosmic 18.10)

[Mario Vukelic]

The docs seem to give an incorrect or at least incomplete and misleading description:

"The on-screen keyboard is automatically enabled if you use a touchscreen
1. Open the Activities overview and start typing Universal Access.
2. Click on Universal Access to open the panel.
3. Switch on Screen Keyboard in the Typing section.
When you next have the opportunity to type, the on-screen keyboard will open at the bottom of the screen."
-- https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/keyboard-osk.html

The Gnome 3.28 release notes say something different, but this is also incorrect:
"The new keyboard automatically activates when a text area is selected, ..."
-- https://help.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.28/

As far as I can tell the behavior is the same in X session and Wayland session, with the one important difference that there is no way to manually activate the OSK in X.

* Neither in X nor in Wayland does the keyboard always automatically activate when selecting a text area.

* As far as I can tell is not necessary to activate it in Universal Access either in X or Wayland. If I enable it, I can see no difference in the reliability of auto activation. E.g., in the Activities search box it auto activates in either case (Wayland or X, activated in Universal Access or not). If it does not auto activate, e.g. in Gnome apps like gnome-terminal or gedit, or in non-Gnome like Firefox, enabling it in UA does not help either.

* It can be summoned in Wayland by swiping up on a touch screen, but this does not work in X. There is no known way to manually activate it in X. (A gnome-shell extension exists but does not work with Gnome 3.28 or 3.30. Also there should be no need to hunt for an unofficial extension for this basic functionality)

The situation is still the same in Cosmic. This documentation issue is particularly troublesome because even in the best case, Wayland, there is no UI hint for how to summon it, and it is difficult to discover. There are several questions on Askubuntu and the answers that existed so far show that basically no-one understood the whole story (for links see my other bug report on discoverability, below)

I also refer you to my comments on the bug report, "New On-screen keyboard cannot be manually triggered to appear": https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1760399/comments/10

New bug report for poor discoverability of swiping up in Wayland:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1791551

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: ubuntu-docs 18.04.4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-34.37-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-34-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: wl nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.3
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sun Sep 9 22:47:11 2018
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-09-15 (2185 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120823.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-docs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-04-08 (154 days ago)

[Mario Vukelic (kreuzsakra)]

So according to the resolution in bug #1760399, the Universal Access is supposed to be enabled after all to make OSK appear in X, and with the resolution it now actually works. Hence the description in the help seems to be (have become) correct at least for X (though it would help to mention swiping up on Wayland).

I suppose this warrants setting it as duplicate