Hi there, similar to Sébastien, I would like to thank Aura for expressing quite comprehensively a feeling of unease that has been forming at the back of my mind over time. As a passionate braille user, I value the experience provided by BRLTTY in the Linux console immensely. In fact, this is the environment I feel most comfortable working in by far. So much so, that I get easily annoyed or impatient with apps in a graphical environment due to less snappy responses (on the braille display), seemingly inconsistent panning behaviour, et cetera. In fact, I have wondered whether it is just me not having spent enough time on getting used to a different environment and tuning it to my liking. There likely is some truth in that, which would be a relief, but Aura's summary seems to confirm my suspicion that there is more to this.
Being a developer myself with some experience in contributing to various foss projects in the past, I feel a growing responsibility to figure out how and where I can help with regard to the accessibility for braille users under Linux as myself, which has not been a focus of mine so far. So, I find a candid discussion as this one very helpful and motivating, even though it makes me realise too, that I can only offer very little as an individual in comparison to the seasoned developers in that field and the work in front of us. So, I shall do some research on what others may already have found out about the reasons for that unpleasant experience of using Emacs in a graphical terminal compared to the console and similar stuff. May be, I can find something I can work on and I certainly will follow this and similar discussions attentively. Best regards, Elias On 2025-04-01 at 20:22:58 (+0200), Sébastien Hinderer <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Aura, > Many thanks for having started this discussion. > > I think I agree with everything you wrote so I am not going to > elaborate as it wouldn't bring anything interesting to the discussion. > > I also believe that improving the situation on the GUI side, of course > including the support of graphical terminal emulators is the most > promising way to go. > > Recently I started to experiment with Windows and I was surprised by the > poverty of braille support. Not that I have a lot of experience so I > would really like to be contracted on this point, but my feeling was > that for graphical widgets Orca's support for Braille is not much more > developed that what we have in Orca, if at all. And this in spite of the > fact that the community of users and developers of NVDA has noting to do > in size with our community, it's way way larger. And this does not even > mention the braille support you have with NVDA in a text terminal. To > me, there is just no possible comparison with what BRLTTY does. It's a > point I do not even manage to convey to visually impaired users of > Windows that do not know BRLTTY because, I think, they cannot even > imagine what we have. > (Again, I would love to be contradicted.) > > The point I would like to make here is that, in my opinion, GUI and the > support of graphical terminals we have on Linux, as broken as it is now, > feels to me as the most promising alternative we have, even when > compared to other operating systems. It's also the most sustainable I > think, provided that we manage to get accessibility integrated in main > stream tools. > > Regarding how this should be achieved, my intuition is that we do not > have the manpower to fix all the bugs we encounter etc. and that it > would be more reasonable to focus on reporting them as appropriately as > possible to make them at least easy to understand and reproduce for the > developers. And, I think we may try to speak louder by organizing > and coordinating ourselves so that, when a bug is reported, several of us > get involved in the discussion. > > Seb. _______________________________________________ This message was sent via the BRLTTY mailing list. To post a message, send an e-mail to: [email protected] For general information, go to: http://brltty.app/mailman/listinfo/brltty
