On 11/17/2011 11:07 AM, Rob Hudson wrote:
I admit that I haven't kept up very well with the current braille
displays, so I don't know how portable they are these days. Last time
I used a dedicated braille display unit, and not a notetaker, it was a
tabletop unit connected via serial port and used with telesensory
screenpower.
Yeah, me too. But some of the new portable bluetooth displays look
awesome. The BraillePen in particular costs $1000 or less, has 12 cells
and fits on a belt.
I also have no idea what android accessibility is like either, so I
freely admit coming in with a great deal of ignorance and would love
to be educated. The thing that is putting me off checking into it is
the fact that I heard android uses the espeak synth and I can't
understand that thing at all, no matter how hard I try. So if we can
indeed get braille working on it, I might invest in an android tablet.
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ESpeak is one of many synths that Android supports. Actually, the ESpeak
voice is no longer kept updated by Google. Pico is the default voice,
which admittedly isn't a whole lot better. But you can get a number of
additional voices on the market. I think the most I've paid is $6 or so.
I'm currently using the high-quality Ivona Kendra voice which is free
for the time being.
Android accessibility used to be a joke, and still is depending on your
perspective (the newer, more accessible version isn't widely available
yet.) However, the newly-released Android 4.0 brings some awesome
improvements. In particular, we now have touchscreen exploration,
introspection such that apps can access window content outside of the
current widget, and browser access (though that latter is done by
building a separate screen reader in Javascript rather than wiring the
browser to the standard API.) But the browser even supports ARIA. I've
used it with the chatroom demo at http://accessibleajax.clcworld.net and
it read incoming messages with no action on my part (at least, it did
under a browser that claims to be a backport to sub-4.0 versions.)
So, yeah, definitely a good time to move on the Braille front. I hope
BRLTTY would be a good fit.
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