This reminds me of how on most Linuxes I've seen(Maybe GNOME is better, I should probably try that again even though I hate gesture and keyboard focused UIs) you can't get an onscreen keyboard that shows and hides properly without nontrivial work.

Seems like an accessibility issue! That, along with offline speech recognition and synthesis, should be built into the batteries included distros by now, right?

I'm glad the web is getting better support for it though!