Disabled Linux users who drive their computers hands-free (voice control, eye tracking, switch input) depend on X11's global APIs for simulating input, querying the focused window, and reading screen state. Distros are dropping X11 for Wayland, which deliberately scattered those primitives across libei, desktop portals, and per-compositor extensions, and the leading tool (Talon) is removing Linux support from its free tier, with the paid tier retaining X11 but not committing to Wayland, leaving many hands-free Linux users without a supported path forward. The opportunity is a single libei-plus-portals abstraction that gives assistive tech and automation tools a compositor-agnostic API again, so users do not get locked out as their distro flips to Wayland-only.
Do not frame this as 'Wayland has no APIs' (KDE devs will correctly push back); the real gap is fragmentation and consent-gating across GNOME/KDE/wlroots. The win is one abstraction over libei plus portals that ships as a near-drop-in for the X11 automation AT tools assume, and you must design around absolute-pointer-position and window-PID being deliberately unavailable.
landscape (6 existing solutions)
X11 exposed global input, window, and focus APIs that assistive tech and automation tools relied on for decades; Wayland's security-first redesign split those primitives across libei, desktop portals, and compositor-specific DBus extensions, none of which is a complete, compositor-agnostic replacement. KDE developers argue the needed pieces already exist while tool authors like Talon call them inadequate and are leaving Linux, so disabled users are caught in the middle as distros phase out X11.