Cheryl,
I sent Dave the name and e-mail address of a person to contact at Apple. I
volunteered to test the software with a PacMate. Depending on Dave's
response, I'll also try to do some development.
Marshall
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cheryl Homiak" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "List, Mac-discuss" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 4:51 PM
Subject: brltty collaboration
I changed the subject line; there's no use people who want to talk only
about the progress on a braille terminal having to wade through such
messages.
From the message Gabe posted, I would conjecture that Dave and others may
have given up on hearing from apple, since he talks about creating a
native screen driver. My own feeling is that apple maybe does not want to
give out this information; since from what I've heard Apple did not want
a third party doing speech accessibility. As for this missing information
being
the whole ball game", I don't think that would be something that could be
ascertained without talking directly to brltty devellopers and finding
out that there's information that could be shared to solve this problem.
As for a braille program just taking its text from vo, my problem with
this is that the braille would then have exactly the capabilities and
shortcomings of vo; anything that vo couldn't figure out, braille would
also be unable to access. This might make little difference or a lot of
difference, but I'd frankly rather, if possible, have a system that can
read the screen for itself than one that has to depend on vo for
everything. the point that you can quickly put together something just
using vo's caption pannel may or may not be correct, but how would you
know without making some effort to work with brltty developers. A
deaf-blind person might be glad to have any braille program, but why
should we settle for a lesser option if there's a possibility of porting
an already-established excellent program? Either there are facts of which
I am unaware which are not being shared or a lot of assumptions are being
made. I will also mention that brltty has the ability to read bootup
messages, etc. instead of just starting up at login, which can be very
helpful to a machine's administrator, though of course I do not know
whether this will be possible in macox. But it's one more reason to
explore the possibility of porting it.
I certainly can't force anybody to work on brlltty, nor was that my
intention; I simply wanted to make people aware of the possibility and
find out why it was being ignored. I really have nothing more to say on
this subject that would be helpful; anybody interested should contact
Dave or the brltty list, as I have said before.
--
Cheryl
"Where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also".
