[BRLTTY] Queries on Navigation in Android

Rob captinlogic at gmail.com
Mon Aug 24 15:52:51 EDT 2015


My braille device is a Braille Sense.
The Brltty documentation for Android says:
The "accessibility focus" feature of Android is used for cursor tracking and routing. It's a soft cursor, not visible on the screen, that can be programmatically associated with any screen element. All screen readers that use it to define the current element for actions (like tapping) will implicitly cooperate reasonably seamlessly with one another.
When you press the go to next/previous line hot keys on your braille device, does the accessibility focus move with you, or are you just scrolling through, like Brltty in a regular terminal, without actually moving anything?
Here's an example.
Today I was in the Message Plus app, sending a text message. I was trying to bring focus to the edit input area where you could type a message. I hit space dot 4 to move down the line, and I saw: Type a Message, but the block style cursor did not appear until I picked up the phone and actually swiped on the screen to bring up the text box.
Then, when I wanted to hit the send button, I tried doing so from the braille device, but hitting the first routing key above the Send button only made a beep sound. This button is supposed to bring accessibility focus to the element, and the second is supposed to tap or click it. This did not happen. Or am I misunderstanding the functions of the keys?
I was under the impression that you could control an Android device with your braille device--at least for the most part--but this is not appearing to be the case. In order to get anything done, I am having to pick up the phone and actually move the screen. And Brltty is not always following me. For instance, when on the home screen, Brltty stays stuck on something called Quick Notifications. It does not track properly in list views either (such as the conversations list in Message plus), and sometimes it stops responding altogether. Perhaps it is the bluetooth protocol, or I am just using Brltty wrong.
The phone is a Galaxy S6, if it matters, running Android 5.0.


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