Hi, Great to have so fast a reply :)
Stefan Reinauer, le Mon 03 Jul 2006 01:11:05 +0200, a écrit : > * Samuel Thibault <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [060703 00:06]: > > BIOSes is an area where accessibility is approximately non-existent. > > Asking vendors to support hardware speech syntheses and braille devices > > is quite dreamwork. I tried to convince accessibility people to release > > basic drivers with BSD licenses so that vendors might integrate them, > > but they just refused that, arguing that vendors will not make any > > effort to integrate them, and there will always be bugs > > Maybe this code could be encapsulated, similar to how VGA > bios or network boot is handled. Indeed, except that it relies on serial or USB support, which might not be easy to ship in a so encapsulated way. > On the other hand, this would cut off quite some of the bringup from > "visibility" I'm sorry, my poor english couldn't understand that :) > > LinuxBios, however, can be a great opportunity to have an accessible > > BIOS. > > > > So what can be done? If I understood well, LinuxBios is a linux kernel > > -based bios. Does that mean that it has the notion of process, or does > > it run only in kernel mode? (which is sufficient for taking advantage of > > linux drivers). > > LinuxBIOS initializes the machine just far enough so that it can run a > Linux kernel from flash memory, hence the name. This in-flash Linux can > run normal userspace programs as well as load another kernel from a > hard disk or any other supported medium. Oh, great. That means that we can run the usual screen reader called brltty, or any other such reader. > usually we can say: the main information exchange with LinuxBIOS (before > the kernel is started) is not via VGA but via serial, which i believe is > in theory usable with a braille terminal connected to another machine. > (Is this correct?) Yes. Minicom is quite accessible, so that's fine. > The interaction part is all happening while Linux is loaded (ie. from flash) > so we could use a local braille terminal at this point by using all the > Linux utilities. Yup. > One question is: how big is the Linux code to support one/some/many/all > braille terminals and can we fit this in a 512kB/1MB flash part. > The answer mostly depends on your needs. Devices usually depend on serial or USB support, plus the /dev/vcsa interface for reading the console's content. Samuel -- linuxbios mailing list [email protected] http://www.openbios.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios
