Hi all
I can’t remember if I’ve brought this up before, but I now use a duel boot
setup between antergos Linux and fedora. I’ve had a lot of requests, mostly by
devin prater, to investigate braille input on Linux. The results are … not
disappointing exactly but … it’s rather fiddly to get going. Here’s how I’d
like braille to work, if possible. You plugin a display, or set up your
Bluetooth display in range of your computer, brltty, or udev, or whatever,
figures out there’s a display there, connects to it, starts brltty, and it
begins putting out braille, both in the console and in xorg/wayland. It is
possible to get it going in a desktop yes, but it’s a little fiddly to get
going. Just having braille turned on in orca doesn’t seem to work. If you try
that you’re likely to get a “screen not in text mode” error on the display and
braille doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I’m not complaining at all,
braille isn’t plug and play, especially on those displays that require you to
be in a braille display mode before it will work. But that’s just for braille
output. I’m not at all sure what’s needed to get braille input, that is, typing
on the braille or qwerty keyboard, to work. Most distros should be packaging
brltty’s udev and policy kit rules, so when a display is connected udev starts
brltty, but not all do. Is it possible for orca to autodetect the braille
display, and whether or not it has a braille or qwerty keyboard and select an
appropriate table? I believe that’s a liblouis question, not a brltty one, but
I’ve been trying to figure out why typing on the braille keyboard simply does
not work. I’ve found a lot of stuff about xbrlapi not working, or not being
started, but this is honestly something brltty should do. Figure out whether
you’re in a desktop, and whether you’re in x or wayland, and start up whatever
is needed for input and contracted output, if set in orca, to work. I can’t
code yet, but if code is needed, is there any way I can help? One of my goals
is to make Linux distros so accessible that special “accessible” distros aren’t
needed anymore, and part of this is making braille a lot more automatic than it
is now. Is ths issue that packagers aren’t including brltty’s udev and policy
kit rules, resulting in brltty not starting? Is it the issue of brltty not for
some reason being able to parse input from the keyboards of notetakers or
braille displays? Is it something with the desktops? I’m just trying to figure
this out, because honestly this should just work.
Sorry if I sound frustrated, I’m really not. I’ve just been going around and
around and around trying to get this working. I don’t currently have a braille
display, so I’ve had to have other people test.
Thanks
Kendell Clark
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
_______________________________________________
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.com/mailman/listinfo/brltty
