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

[Jason White]

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 07:52:18PM -0500, Dave Mielke wrote:
> There's already a need for keyboard-based command entry, e.g. to support
> braille dispalys with no or few keys.
> 
> The only issue, as I see it, is how much speech-oriented functionality should
> be added. I'm not a speech user so I'm a bit ignorant in this area. If all
> that's needed are a speech cursor and simple commands like saying letters,
> words, and lines, then I don't see a problem.

This seems reasonable enough, although to avoid duplication of effort and to
maintain the focus of the project, I also see the value in the argument that
speech support (not controlled by braille display keys) would be better
developed in another project, where it is likely to get more specific
attention and attract speech users.

Good speech support involves more than just commands to say characters, words
and lines - there also need to be commands to silence speech, to review the
screen in various ways, to control character/word echo while typing, to allow
the review cursor and the system cursor to be synchronized, to support
indexing (where the speech is used to read a document and the user can press a
  key to move the system cursor to the last word spoken), etc. I think all of
  those features can be supported well in Linux, but it's better done in a
  dedicated project that focuses on speech output. Speakup is probably the
  best of what currently exists for the Linux console in that area.

I think the best solution would be for speech screen reader support to be
developed elsewhere, but there should also be some cooperation. For example,
people who use both braille and speech simultaneously could benefit from the
option of moving the braille window to where the speech review cursor is
located, or having the speech track the braille.

Unless it is limited to a few basic commands as Dave suggested, my reaction
would be to say no - BRLTTY should not support speech only interaction.