Up to now I can't say if I like the keyboard or not. I'm just not used to it. Maybe that will change, maybe it won't. But I already like it more than on-screen keyboards.


That doesn't bother me at all.


I checked the camera button and I don't think it can be of any use in ED since it doesn't even send a keycode.


...and with no place left on the screen to show anything.


gnome-orca has a magnifier included. But it comes with a lot of bloat that makes even my laptop sluggish, which was cutting edge technology little more than a year ago.
I think I have once seen a leaner magnification tool, but I don't know the name anymore. It was not gnome-mag, or at least it was not gnome-mag alone but with some GUI frontend.

I tried to tinker some d-pad implementation and while I was researching for some details I stumbled upon a tool called keynav which is already in the debian repository. It's very similar to what I had in mind, but even better. Its usage seems a bit strange at first but I guess that's just a question of getting used to it and I think this usage is part of what makes keynav superior to my idea.
I think it has great potential in ED, at least for power users. Unfortunately the versions up to sid have a quite annoying bug which makes the lxde menu non-functional. So you'll need the experimental package. This in turn needs libxdo2 from sid, but apart from that there are (currently) no dependency issues.
If you start keynav it complains that it is unable to lookup the keycode for "bracketleft" even if this character isn't used in the configuration file. But if you tell xkvbd to issue "[" before you start keynav the error will disapppear.