[BRLTTY] 6-8 key Braille entry from any keyboard

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

John J. Boyer, le Thu 09 Aug 2012 08:06:09 -0500, a écrit :
> My question was, does BRLTTY have such a facility and if so how is it 
> implemented? I am looking for information that might speed up my own 
> sork on a library incorporating it.

The way BRLTTY achieves it is through input grabbing: using EVIOCGRAB,
it gets over all keyboard input devices to eat their events, and then
(if the keys are not for BRLTTY), re-write them onto /dev/uinput.

Of course, that only works for the Linux console. For X11, the right way
to implement it is to write an scim or uim module.

Another thing worth knowing is that both the Linux kernel and X11
already have some braille typing support. For Linux, see the
console-braille package on 
http://cdn.debian.net/debian/pool/main/c/console-braille/console-braille_1.3.tar.gz
and for X11, see the brai layout. Both produce unicode braille patterns.
In the case of X, using a .XCompose file (e.g. <braille_dots_17> : "A")
permits to translate that into characters.

Samuel