[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?

[Patricia Fraser]

Hi,

The Google Accessibility Project people are already looking at adding 
brltty to at least the Android accessibility project; their developer 
Peter Lundblad in Geneva has been working with a BraillePen 12 on an 
Android system of some sort, using brltty.

It's probably worth contacting that team to see what they're doing, at 
least alongside any other projects that get started...

Contacts I have are Clara Rivera Rodriguez, rivera at google.com and Naomi 
Black, naomib at google.com - they'll be able to put you in touch with whoever.

Cheers,

Patricia.

On 17/11/2011 17:16, Nolan Darilek wrote:
> 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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-- 
Patricia Fraser                       pfraser at harpo.com.pl
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