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

[Klaus Knopper]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 03:02:37PM -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> 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?

That's what I was trying to accomplish: actively helping to improve an
existing solution, namely brltty, to be a good replacement for sbl.

> 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?

Because it makes sense?

> 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.

Right, I always wondered why "ls" has so many options. There should
really be 100 programs with NO options instead, that can then be
combined on the command line, in order to do the same thing as
ls -lart ...  ;-)

Kidding apart, if it's the common opinion here that brltty should NOT
have support for keyboard-based navigation and support for communication
with different speech synhesizers as an add-on, I can as well continue
to rewrite sbl, rather than going into endless discussions about why
brltty is not a screenreader or similar.

It's just that Mario almost convinced me that it would make sense to
migrate from sbl to brltty in the long term, to have a central point of
support for braille+speech related issues in a lot of different cliet
programs, rather than writing individual and mutual incompatible
programs that all attempt to do the same thing.

Hope you understand my just best intention. I'm not trying to put any
unnecessary work on anyone or float the list with patches that nobody
wants.

Anyways, back to work, need to prepare some things before leaving to
India, where a braille device is totally beyond the financial
possibilities of most people who could need one.

-Klaus