[BRLTTY] Braille Display Protocol

[Tom Masterson]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2019, Justin Cunningham wrote:

> Hello,
>
>> The difficulty is that integration with a screen reader, e.g.
>> brltty, isn't ultimately very useful if there isn't any way to navigate the
>> braille display around the screen.
>
> I see I’ve been misinterpreting what a screen reader does. I always thought that the text that is displayed to you is the text that the mouse is currently hovering over. When I played around with NVDA, the narrator spoke the text being hovered over so I just assumed the same applied to Braille Displays but I must be wrong.
>
> We’re just trying to show that the prototype also works independent of human input (e.g. right now, we have to manually type a character).

You are not entirely wrong.  A screen reader does dosplay what is under 
the cursor (mouse or otherwise).  However because speech and braille are 
limited to what they can show at one time you must be able to move around 
the screen to get the context of what you are looking at.  Thus the need 
for navigation.

Tom


>
> Thanks,
> Justin
>
>> On 19 Dec 2019, at 15:49, Dave Mielke <Dave at mielke.cc> wrote:
>>
>> [quoted lines by Justin Cunningham on 2019/12/18 at 22:13 +0000]
>>
>>> My device is pretty barebones. It has no buttons and only one cell. I was
>>> pointed towards the ‘skeleton’/starter driver in the Brltty GitHub repository.
>>> Would that be enough (obviously after some modifying and altering) for my
>>> display?
>>
>> Yes, it would. The difficulty is that integration with a screen reader, e.g.
>> brltty, isn't ultimately very useful if there isn't any way to navigate the
>> braille display around the screen. Usually, of course, those are on the braille
>> device itself. If you were using Linux then there are tables that bind
>> navigation actions to the computer's keyboard. Unfortunatey, we haven't gotten
>> around to implementing that kind of support on Windows. While it can be, and
>> should be, done, it hasn't been high enough on the priority list so far.
>>
>> --
>> I believe the Bible to be the very Word of God: http://Mielke.cc/bible/
>> Dave Mielke            | 2213 Fox Crescent | WebHome: http://Mielke.cc/
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