[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?

[Nolan Darilek]

On 11/17/2011 11:38 AM, Dave Mielke wrote:
> I'd certainly look into it were I to have access to a device. 

Cool deal, I'll pass that along and see if we can make something happen.


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

I briefly examined the installation process, and it looked like a config 
file might be necessary? The most ideal case would be to pair a 
bluetooth display and have it come up almost immediately, but we're not 
going to have that yet. The next most likely possibility is that the 
bluetooth display is paired, and then someone runs a separate service 
that either lets the user choose from a list of displays, or sees that 
only one is available and configures it. My point is that the user 
doesn't have access to a full command line and has limited access to the 
filesystem such that it is practically useless to them. So the use case 
needs to be as simple as possible.

I'm not sure if any other Android hardware uses a serial port, so it may 
be sufficient to just test each port in sequence, send data and then ask 
the user if they received a message. Or maybe the user could indicate 
receipt by pressing a button on the display itself. So there'd first be 
a host-pairing process with the bluetooth device, and a second pairing 
process with the Braille display. Either way, the process of pairing 
with and initializing a Braille display needs to happen entirely in the 
Android GUI.

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

I think that STDIN/STDOUT would be easier if only because there are 
fewer moving parts. Just open the process in a pipe and read/write to it 
vs. managing a separate socket and its associated permissions. But I 
don't intend to bikeshed that at this stage.