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

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Jason White on 2007/01/29 at 13:29 +1100]

>Since obtaining a braille display for my laptop, I have been using it with
>braille only, without even bothering to try to get speech working I used to
>run software DECTALK on it, but this wasn't reliable.
>
>I love braille displays.

I've really only ever used braille and have found it entirely sufficient. I
have, however, found a few cases where speech comes in handy. One is to alert
me when there's an incoming MSN message, including telling me whom it's from. 
Another is when arrowing quickly through a menu or list in search of a
particular item.  Another might be, although I've never experimented with it,
the writing of the shell command prompt so that I don't need to keep checking
the brialle display for it. Another is progress alerts of a countdown timer. 

Looking at this issue from another angle, I'm glad that the caller-id box
plugged into my phone line talks rather than uses braille because it provides
me with asynchronous, unexpected alerts which I want to know about immediately
and from a distance without having to quickly drop everything, wash my hands,
and run over to a braille display in order to read it. If I ever get into using
some sort of GPS receiver I'm sure I'd want it to talk to me too, especially
here during our extremely cold winters when removing my gloves is the last
thing I'd want to do. Every tool has its use.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | I believe that the Bible is the
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