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

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007, Klaus Knopper wrote:

> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> Which "other speech-based screen readers that do the job well" are you
> referring to? Everything I tested was not in the least way sufficient
> for a computer beginner, and didn't work well with either braille or
> software sound synthesizers. (yasr, brass, speakup, ...)

Then why not improving on an existing solution instead of duplicating 
that work again?

> So far, I know only of sbl as both, a decent braille driver with keboard
> support, and an interface to use festival or mbrola with
> user-configuration and profiles.

You say that "only sbl as both" but this is something that does not have 
to be in the same package.  Why do you think that full speech support 
and full braille support has to be in the same screen reader?

> I CAN stay with sbl, but I had hoped that brltty could become a better
> replacement. Having seen and wored with the sbl code, I don't think it
> is very maintainable in the long term.

It wouldn't help brltty in the long term either if it tried to do too 
much.  The brltty code is already complex enough for the average 
programmer, and mixing speech support beyond what's already there will 
only make the matter worse.

The Unix philosophy is to have small tools that do one thing but that do 
it well, and then use those tools together.  Not to have a giant 
application that tries to do everything and that no one understants 
fully anymore.

Which is why I think true speech support should be done outside of 
brltty and independently of brltty.  Either by improving one of the 
existing solutions, or starting one from scratch if the existing ones 
cannot be salvaged.

That doesn't mean that the speech tool and the braille tool may not 
communicate together.  To the contrary, brlapi is meant exactly for 
that: communicating with foreign applications, the same way brltty can 
be made to talk to speech dispatcher for example.

But true speech support is programmatically different from true braille 
support, and adding that to brltty would only serve to bloat it and make 
it far more difficult to maintain.


Nicolas