macOS Programmatically typing into secure input fields, guidance needed

[morinted]

Hi all,

I'm posting to ask about overriding secure text input in OS X. It sounds, obviously, like quite the breach of security, but let me explain my use case.

Plover is a stenographic program that takes user input (stenography) from either an NKRO keyboard or a serial port and then outputs text.

In NKRO mode, we have to block the nonsensical input and only output the words that the user wants to write.

Everything works great, except for secure text/password fields. It's annoying to be unable to type into password fields and to have to resort to using a regular keyboard again.

I'm wondering if there's any way we can get the entry into password fields to let OS X be more fully Plover compatible.

There's an open GitHub issue here https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/issues/247

And this is the Python + Quartz code that does the output on OS X: https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/blob/master/plover/oslayer/osxkeyboardcontrol.py

Any ideas on how to resolve this or where I can start looking?

Cheers,
Ted

 

[mfram]

Are you using the Accessibliity features? I think there's a feature that can be enabled to send keyboard input over a serial port. It's designed for external "non-standard" keyboards and I think needs to be enabled. I don't know the details of the protocol. But that's something to look in to.