[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Nolan Darilek on 2011/11/17 at 10:16 -0600]

>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'd certainly look into it were I to have access to a device.

>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. 

I'm assuming the answer is yes, though it's hard to know exactly what you're 
asking for here.

>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?

When it comes to Bluetooth, all of the models I'm aware of simply use the 
serial profile. There's no way to easily tell if any of them is actually a 
braille device.

To date, users use the host's facilities for scanning visible Bluetooth devices 
and for pairing them.

>Also, does BRLTTY/BRLAPI do its own grade 2 translation, or do I need
>a separate library for that?

Brltty can do contracted braille.

>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.

That should be possible. Or, perhaps, a local (commonly called Unix domain) 
socket.

>Given that the use case is phones and tablets, we're probably limited to 
>bluetooth displays, which may or may not be an issue.

That's not an issue for me.

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