[BRLTTY] introductions and queries

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Zachary Kline on 2009/07/18 at 15:06 -0700]

>I've recently decided to get a Braille display, and am contemplating the
>APH refreshabraille.  I've had good results with the other APH products
>I've used, and was gratified to find support for this in brltty.
>That being said, are there any issues or quirks I should be aware of
>when fiddling with this display?  It'll be my first real exposure to
>such a unit.
>Any advice or feedback would be appreciated.

The Refreshabraille is indeed a very nice and well-designed device. It has only 
18 cells, though. This may ultimately be smaller than you'd prefer. It's always 
a trade-off between size and cost, though, and only you can make an informed 
decision on that insofar as your own needs and circumstances are concerned.

There's another point to consider as well. The Refreshabraille essentially has 
a braille keyboard (eight dots and a spacebar) and a five-way joystick. It 
also, of course, has cursor routing keys. Brltty currently interprets the 
braille keyboard as exactly that, and the joystick in terms of the four arrow 
keys and the enter key. This is because that's what works best with the Icon 
and the Braille+ PDAs. This way of interpreting the keys, however, doesn't work 
well in terms of screen navigation. It's my intention to find a way to resolve 
this problem, but that hasn't been done yet. I'll probably get to it within the 
next month or so.

As I said at the outset, though, it is a good device. It's just that brltty 
support for it is brand new, and there are still a few things that need to be 
done in order to make it work well with respect to screen navigation.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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