[BRLTTY] brltty "keyboard braille device" support (and a few more things)

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Jason White on 2007/01/25 at 16:38 +1100]

>A question of motivation: why would you want to accept keyboard commands when
>the braille display is not connected? Is it to change the configuration before
>re-connecting?

There has long been a desire by some to have brltty provide reasonable, simple,
speech-based screen navigation. While I'm not in favour of making brltty be the
world's best speech-based screen reader, the fact is that it already does
provide some speech functions. To me, it makes sense to improve this capability
if it can be done in an easy and non-intrusive way.

The next logical step is to allow speech-based navigation when the braille
display isn't connected. That, of course, would require keyboard-based
commands. This, too, is now very easy to do give the asynchronous event
facility which brltty now has and the uinput facility which the kernel now has. 
At the very least, one benefit of all of this would be that a braille user who
can also hear wouldn't be stuck were he to have problems getting his serial
cable or Bluetooth connection working.

>I can understand why support for keyboard commands would be desirable - some
>braille displays might not provide enough keys and switches of their own to
>cover the full set of BRLTTY commands.

There's even one display that I'm aware of which has no keys at all. I was
asked a long time ago to support it, and it's high time I did something about
it.

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