Accessibilty shortcut to center the mouse for visually impaired?

Janghou

8/22/24, 9:29 AM

For a visually impaired person with a very narrow field of vision it can be difficult to locate the mouse.

Imagine someone with glaucoma, they are looking through a straw, so they have to scan the screen (or a sentence character by character).

Is there a keyboard shortcut to center the cursor on the screen, or any other sensible place like left top?

Preferable a solution that works in both Wayland and X11 in Ubuntu 22.04.

Updated

1 + 0

gnome

accessibility

cursor

22.04

Score:1

Ubuntu

vanadium

8/22/24, 10:10 AM

There is currently no keyboard shortcut or any other provision to return the mouse cursor to a standard position.

You could create a shortcut key that centers the mouse cursor yourself using a keyboard/mouse simulation tool. ydotool works on both Xorg and Wayland. A shortcut key could then be assigned that invokes ydotool to position the mouse cursor on the center of the screen.

Note that there is different feature in Accessibility that may fit the purpose: you can highlight the cursor so it can easily be seen where it currently is by pressing a shortcut key (by default the left Ctrl key). You can turn that on under "Settings" - "Accessibility" - "Pointing & Clicking": "Locate Pointer". Caveat for this feature to work, "Reduce Animations" under "Accessibility" - "Seeing" may not be turned of.

+ 3

Janghou

8/22/24, 11:36 AM

Thx, I'm aware of the locate cursor function, but that does not really help a person with a narrow visual field (looking through a straw)

vanadium

8/22/24, 1:00 PM

That is why I first answered how it could be done, before pointing to the locate cursor function.

Janghou

8/22/24, 7:47 PM

Yes, ydotool is a good tip, something like that crossed my mind.

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