Hi folks. Some of you may know me from my work on Android. In
particular, I've written the Spiel screen reader
(http://spielproject.info) and a few other Android apps.
During the early part of this year, I worked with National Braille Press
on their Android notetaker project. Work died down in June but seems to
be picking up again, and we seem to be focusing on Braille on the
Android platform.
There is currently no Android Braille API, but I think we're considering
creating one, at least until Android supports it natively. I'm wondering
if BRLTTY might be a good candidate for supporting this?
I've read enough of the list archives to know that there isn't a port to
Android. The bottleneck here seems to be that no one on the team has an
Android device with which to work. If you did have an Android device,
would someone have cycles to look into a port?
I'm also wondering if BRLTTY would fit some of the higher level
requirements of such an API? No one wants to edit config files or start
daemons on their phones. Until Braille display support gets baked in
natively, I'm envisioning users having to pair a bluetooth display as
they would a regular device, then firing up some GUI that probes all
connected bluetooth devices, determines which are Braille displays and
makes them available in a list for the user to choose. Does BRLTTY have
any sort of device scanning mechanism that can ping a wildcard list of
devices and return which are Braille displays plus any relevant stats?
Also, does BRLTTY/BRLAPI do its own grade 2 translation, or do I need a
separate library for that?
My intention is to ship a low-level Braille API and associated service
that communicates between higher-level apps and Braille displays. I
think that if we can cross-compile BRLTTY for Android, then ship the
binary as a resource within the service, then the Android app can run a
BRLTTY instance and handle communication. My understanding is that
BRLAPI communicates with a running BRLTTY daemon. It might be easier if
this daemon could communicate over STDIN/STDOUT rather than a port on
localhost.
Anyhow, if this seems like a promising project then I might be able to
secure Android hardware for anyone who feels confident that they can
attempt a port. Given that the use case is phones and tablets, we're
probably limited to bluetooth displays, which may or may not be an issue.
Thanks for reading.
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