[BRLTTY] Making postmarketOS blind-accessible

[Rich Morin]

After some informal research and reflection, I've decided that postmarketOS is the most promising basis for a blind-accessible, Linux-based cell phone operating system.  Developers are working on getting it to support a large number of devices (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices), many of which are available for very little money.

PostmarketOS is based on Alpine Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux), a popular, but very minimalistic Linux variant.  For example, it uses BusyBox to replace the functions of more than 300 common commands.  So, postmarketOS should run pretty well, even on fairly old cell phones and tablets.

In an effort to get things moving, I've started an Accessibility page in the postmarketOS wiki.  The "Packages" section contains entries for plausible software packages (e.g., BRLTTY, Fenrir, Lynx, Orca, w3m), including short descriptions and porting status.  The "Resources" section contains links to other, related pages.

To be clear, I don't expect that the base postmarketOS releases will ever contain these packages.  However, there should be a way to create a blind-accessible variant or upgrade path.  If you find this notion interesting, please check out the (WIP) Accessibility page  (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Accessibility).  If the page is missing a favorite package, please add it yourself or email me so I can add it.  More generally, feel free to contact me off-list with comments, suggestions, etc.

-r