[BRLTTY] What is the best way to deal with Unicode characters?

[Shérab]

Hi,

Nicolas Pitre (2019/09/28 16:00 -0400):
> On Sat, 28 Sep 2019, Shérab wrote:
> 
> > It is perhaps something one just has to live with, I don't know. Just
> > trying to share some thoughts here. Perhaps we should communicate
> > towards our sighted colleagues that these unicode characters are simply
> > not practical to use for us visually impaired. After all, the idea of
> > lines of code not longer than 80 characters because of braille displays
> > has become rather well known so why not do something similar about the
> > use of unicode characters in programming or so?
> 
> I'd advise against this. To the contrary, unicode usage should be 
> encouraged as much as possible.
> 
> Those unicode characters are at last a universal standard way to 
> communicate which also includes emojis etc. The alternative to emojis 
> and special characters is embedded images which are not standardized at 
> all, and worse are completely inaccessible.

Sure. It's just that in the context of programming the choice is rather
between Unicode and ASCII, I don't think images are an option in htat
particular context, but I very much agree with what you are writing in
the general case.

> We might have alignment issues with unicode description and such, but 
> that's something for brltty and similar tools to solve. Working 
> around this issue by asking other 
> people not to use unicode is not a good solution.
> 
> Wrt brltty: it might be possible to quickly toggle between two modes, 
> just like 6/8-dot braille, where one of these modes has unicode chars 
> occupy their expected width using some replacement character 
> representation (e.g. \alpha could be an a with dot 8 blinking or the 
> like) and another mode where such character are spelled out using their 
> unicode description. This way you get both the presentation alignment 
> and the description but just not simultaneously.

That indeed seems a good solution to me. At least one worth
experimenting.

Shérab.