[BRLTTY] android app

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Rob Hudson on 2013/04/18 at 15:07 -0500]

>I know almost nothing about android, so I'm going to sound stupid. But anyway.

Don't worry about it. It's way better to ask than not to ask when one isn't 
sure about something. A sincere question is never stupid, and being honest when 
we're not sure about something is always the wiser course.

>I've been thinking about getting an Android device. My question is: should I 
>get a phone or a tablet? Which would work better in terms of working with 
>BRLTTY or does it matter?

Brltty will work equally well on either one. If it's important that you be able 
to make phone calls then you probably want a phone, although you can make phone 
calls via a tablet using apps like Skype or Oovoo. Even when using such apps to 
make phone calls, though, a tablet would, of course, require a wi-fi connection 
unless you purchase a USB dongle which facilitates cellular network 
connectivity. So my suggestion is that if you'd like to make phone calls then 
get a phone.

Another consideration is how much vision you have. If you have some vision, and 
can read large print, then you may benefit from the larger size of a tablet. 
Google does offer magnification capability, but, being as I'm fully blind, I 
can't try it out, and, therefore, have no opinion on how well it works.

Then there's the issue of portability. Put another way, a tablet doesn't fit 
into a pocket. It's much more inconvenient to carry around than a phone is.

Android phones and Android tablets can run the very same apps so there's no 
reason to prefer one over the other from that perspective.

>If I get something like a Nook Color, am I going to be able to read books on 
>it with BRLTTY?

Yes, and no. There are esentially two kinds of eBooks. The kind that isn't 
accessible is simply a set of scanned in PDF pages. Those can't even be read by 
speech-based screen readers. They even come with a warning that sighted readers 
are better off with a the larger screen of a tablet than with the smaller 
screen of a phone. I suppose one could apply OCR (optical character 
recognition) software to make this kind of eBook accessible, but I'm unaware of 
that having been done yet.

>If I get a phone, will I be able to read text messages with it?

Yes. If you get a keyboardless phone, though, you may find the on-screen 
keyboard rather frustrating. I myself have never taken to it.

>How much functionality are we able to access?

That, of course, is impossible to answer. The general answer is that the 
graphical world is never very usable by blind people. For example, Google Maps 
and lots of its friends (Google Street View, etc) aren't accessible.

That being said, Google has an option in Maps which makes it easy for a blind 
person to explore street intersections in an area. If you move your finger in a 
given direction, it tells you which street you're moving along and which 
streets you're crossing.

Another problematic area is when app writers use pictures instead of properly 
labelled buttons. In those cases, the best that a screen reader can do, be it 
brltty or any other screen reader, is tell you that you're on a button.

>My second question is what kind of display should I look at? I of course want 
>something portable that can run on batteries, but not necessarily a full 
>notetaker like a braille sense or braille note. Since we are dealing with 
>phones or tablets, probably a 20 cell display should be enough, although, 
>since I really don't know anything about this, I'm just guessing.

This, in my opinion, is strictly a matter of personal taste. Everyone has 
different ideas on what he or she feels comfortable carrying around, which 
features he or she has access to, whether those features are available within 
the braille deivce or within the phone/tablet, etc. There's no right answer.

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