[BRLTTY] BrlAPI Raw key code mode?

[Mario Lang]

Dave Mielke <dave at mielke.cc> writes:

> Then, of course, we need to know what the new commands need to be. Perhaps 
> someone wouldn't mind looking at Orca and NVDA in order to make a list of what 
> bindable actions each of those screen readers offers.

I am in the middle of a new cluster installation at work, which reduces
my motivated spare time at the moment to a bare minimum.  If nobody
beats me to it, I can have a look at the Orca commands after the weekend.

> People who have access to JAWS, Window Eyes, Dolphin, etc could also
> provide lists of the bindable actions that those screen readers
> offer.

I guess I could try to extract the JAWS command list, but I am a bit
sceptical about the usefulness of that particular list, since it is
imensely huge.  JAWS has way over 1000 bindable commands.  As a long
time Emacs user, I always felt their approach has something similar to
what Emacs always did.  Emacs has *way* more user-invokable/bindable
commands then it has actually bound to keystrokes.
For a reason.  Because in Emacs, and in JAWS, you can define
new bindable commands by writing a script.  Their approach is: If you
need anything solved which isn't implemented yet,
use the scripting API to implement it yourself, and bind it to a keyboard or
braille display key combination.  Orca, which is written in Python and
deliberately made quite customizable, allows for something similar by
the way.  It ships with a predefined set of commands, but
allows the user to create new ones.  To throw in a bit of history, this
was actually one of the reasons why Marc Mulcahy started to write Orca,
despite the fact that Gnopernicus was just being developed.  His major
grudge with it was the static nature of the program.  Gnopernicus
offered a fixed set of commands and no scripting abilities.
So while I am pretty excited about
a renewed attempt to generalize GUI screen reader commands, I wonder how
this (power user) usage pattern is going to work for Braille users.
Maybe it would just be enough to define a number of unused commands
which scripting users could define by editing our key tables.  Maybe
that is already enough.  But I think we should keep this usage pattern
in mind.

-- 
CYa,
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