[BRLTTY] Can BRLTTY indicaste indentation?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by John J. Boyer on 2020/08/21 at 09:06 -0500]

>Speech screenreaders indicate indentation. Why not Braille?

Of course they can, but there's a reason why such a feature is more commonly
available for speech, i.e. leading whitespace is both silent and uncountable.
In braille, however, leading whitespace is both visible and countable.

By the way: If brltty's autospeak feature is enabled then you can (sub)enable
the speaking of a line's indentation.

Note that, on most braille displays, it isn't necessary to separately count
each leading space because it's common for there to be a feelable mark
(usually) above or below each fifth cell.

Note that there's always "room" to prepend a line with its indentation in
speech, but, if the indent is small, there wouldn't necessarily be enough room
at the start of a line in braille to display it.

I can think of two ways to implement this feature in braille. One is to
implement a new command which would briefly display the number of characters
from the beginning of the current line to the location associated with a given
routing key. This, of coruse, would require the defining of a model-dependent
key combination. The other, if you're willing to sacrifice a few cells at the
start or end of your display, would be to define a new status cell type which
would display the current line's indentation.

Note that, whether speech or braille, knowing the indentation of the current
line can only work properly if line numbering is turned off. With line
numbering turned on, the best any screen reader can do is tell you the
indentation of the first digit of the line number.

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