Lifetime of $._data

Lifetime of $._data

I'm currently working on a tool that examines accessibility issues pertaining to client websites and would like to add jQuery event handling as part of our automatic analysis. One of our rules accounts for having a tabIndex property associated with elements on the page that have an assigned click handler in order to ensure that the elements are also keyboard accessible.

Given an HTMLElement, you can use the $._data method to access the event handlers that are associated with said element, which allows for us to do those check programmatically.

My concern is with the deprecation comment on line 3738 of jQuery-2.1.4.js as it looks like access to the event queue in jQuery is going to be fully private sometime in the future. Is there an alternative way to access the event queue from a public accessor because deprecating and removing access to the data_priv member property will halt any analysis we can provide. 

Or alternatively, is there a more appropriate channel to ask this question?