[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?

[Nolan Darilek]

On 11/17/2011 11:07 AM, Rob Hudson wrote:
> I admit that I haven't kept up very well with the current braille 
> displays, so I don't know how portable they are these days. Last time 
> I used a dedicated braille display unit, and not a notetaker, it was a 
> tabletop unit connected via serial port and used with telesensory 
> screenpower.


Yeah, me too. But some of the new portable bluetooth displays look 
awesome. The BraillePen in particular costs $1000 or less, has 12 cells 
and fits on a belt.

> I also have no idea what android accessibility is like either, so I 
> freely admit coming in with a great deal of ignorance and would love 
> to be educated. The thing that is putting me off checking into it is 
> the fact that I heard android uses the espeak synth and I can't 
> understand that thing at all, no matter how hard I try. So if we can 
> indeed get braille working on it, I might invest in an android tablet.
> _______________________________________________

ESpeak is one of many synths that Android supports. Actually, the ESpeak 
voice is no longer kept updated by Google. Pico is the default voice, 
which admittedly isn't a whole lot better. But you can get a number of 
additional voices on the market. I think the most I've paid is $6 or so. 
I'm currently using the high-quality Ivona Kendra voice which is free 
for the time being.

Android accessibility used to be a joke, and still is depending on your 
perspective (the newer, more accessible version isn't widely available 
yet.) However, the newly-released Android 4.0 brings some awesome 
improvements. In particular, we now have touchscreen exploration, 
introspection such that apps can access window content outside of the 
current widget, and browser access (though that latter is done by 
building a separate screen reader in Javascript rather than wiring the 
browser to the standard API.) But the browser even supports ARIA. I've 
used it with the chatroom demo at http://accessibleajax.clcworld.net and 
it read incoming messages with no action on my part (at least, it did 
under a browser that claims to be a backport to sub-4.0 versions.)

So, yeah, definitely a good time to move on the Braille front. I hope 
BRLTTY would be a good fit.