[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?

[Rob Hudson]

I'm all for braille support, but doesn't that sorta defeat the purpose of a 
mobile phone? Not discouraging, just asking questions.
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nolan Darilek" <nolan at thewordnerd.info>
To: <BRLTTY at mielke.cc>
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 10:16 AM
Subject: [BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?


> Hi folks. Some of you may know me from my work on Android. In particular, 
> I've written the Spiel screen reader (http://spielproject.info) and a few 
> other Android apps.
>
> During the early part of this year, I worked with National Braille Press 
> on their Android notetaker project. Work died down in June but seems to be 
> picking up again, and we seem to be focusing on Braille on the Android 
> platform.
>
> There is currently no Android Braille API, but I think we're considering 
> creating one, at least until Android supports it natively. I'm wondering 
> if BRLTTY might be a good candidate for supporting this?
>
> I've read enough of the list archives to know that there isn't a port to 
> Android. The bottleneck here seems to be that no one on the team has an 
> Android device with which to work. If you did have an Android device, 
> would someone have cycles to look into a port?
>
> I'm also wondering if BRLTTY would fit some of the higher level 
> requirements of such an API? No one wants to edit config files or start 
> daemons on their phones. Until Braille display support gets baked in 
> natively, I'm envisioning users having to pair a bluetooth display as they 
> would a regular device, then firing up some GUI that probes all connected 
> bluetooth devices, determines which are Braille displays and makes them 
> available in a list for the user to choose. Does BRLTTY have any sort of 
> device scanning mechanism that can ping a wildcard list of devices and 
> return which are Braille displays plus any relevant stats?
>
> Also, does BRLTTY/BRLAPI do its own grade 2 translation, or do I need a 
> separate library for that?
>
> My intention is to ship a low-level Braille API and associated service 
> that communicates between higher-level apps and Braille displays. I think 
> that if we can cross-compile BRLTTY for Android, then ship the binary as a 
> resource within the service, then the Android app can run a BRLTTY 
> instance and handle communication. My understanding is that BRLAPI 
> communicates with a running BRLTTY daemon. It might be easier if this 
> daemon could communicate over STDIN/STDOUT rather than a port on 
> localhost.
>
> Anyhow, if this seems like a promising project then I might be able to 
> secure Android hardware for anyone who feels confident that they can 
> attempt a port. Given that the use case is phones and tablets, we're 
> probably limited to bluetooth displays, which may or may not be an issue.
>
> Thanks for reading.
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