On 2021-03-23, Ethin Probst <harlydavid...@gmail.com> wrote: > Apologies if this is unnecessary sending of this, but I sent this to > the tech OpenBSD mailing list (which might've not been the right list) > so I'm re-sending it to this one just in case. (It might've gotten > lost too.) The original email is below:
It did go through but I think the problem is that nobody has a good answer. > So I've really wanted to try OpenBSD in a non-server configuration > where I'm not installing over the internet on a remote server but on > the local machine, but to my knowledge the OpenBSD installation media > has no accessibility functionality whatsoever. (I'm not even sure if > the installed system or any of the packages therein, such as in the > ports collection, contains accessibility software.) > > Therefore, I'm wondering what it would take to add accessibility to > the console portion of OpenBSD to begin with, as that as the simplest > interface at the moment. The Orca screen reader may work on the > desktop. There's a screen reader for the Linx console called > Fenrir[1], but it may require functionality that is not available in > OpenBSD, such as libevent. I've yet to try loading Fenrir on an > installed OpenBSD system. > > Thoughts as to how this all could be achieved? I'm looking particular > at screen readers; braille displays can be accomplished through > something like brltty. libevent is not a problem, dozens of programs in the OpenBSD base system use it already. The problem for Fenrir is that it can't read the contents of the system console display, the OpenBSD kernel doesn't have a way to do this. It might not be difficult to add a simple implementation of this, but the challenge is doing it safely, especially around permissions and access controls. Obviously a lot of care would be needed if it was to become part of OpenBSD itself, screen contents are often sensitive. BRLTTY sidesteps this by not working with the system console on OpenBSD. It relies on a patched old version of GNU Screen that makes the contents of the buffer available over shared memory. Obviously this isn't ideal but it's all we have for now. BRLTTY isn't just for Braille terminals, it does have some text-to-speech features too, though I have no idea how well that works in practice, I guess it will be primitive compared to dedicated screen reader software, but maybe still useful. I am not certain that the text-to-speech actually works in the OpenBSD port though. At least basic functionality worked about 2 years ago (I tested it with the X 'test' driver when working on the screen-shm port). So, thinking about what else could be done. It might be possible to modify Fenrir to interface with screen-shm like BRLTTY does. It wouldn't give full system console access but still better than nothing. A more modern way would be to find a way to interface with tmux instead. Still no direct system console access, but at least it's in the base OS, it already deals with sharing access between login sessions, and would be portable to many OS. And the basic tmux design with separate client/server processes that communicate with each other is a much better fit for doing this than GNU Screen which is a single program.
