[BRLTTY] Fwd: Problems when using brltty in the terminal

[Christian Schoepplein]

On Tue, May 11, 2021 at 03:00:09PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
>Christian Schoepplein, le mar. 11 mai 2021 14:46:45 +0200, a ecrit:
>> Am 11.05.2021 um 14:42 schrieb Samuel Thibault:
>> > Christian Schoepplein, le mar. 11 mai 2021 14:37:42 +0200, a ecrit:
>> > > 
>> > > Am 11.05.2021 um 11:02 schrieb Samuel Thibault:
>> > > > Christian Schoepplein, le mar. 11 mai 2021 09:04:26 +0200, a ecrit:
>> > > > > It also turned out that many problems are gone when Mate terminal is used in
>> > > > > fullscreen mode.
>> > > > 
>> > > > Oh? That's surprising since it shouldn't be changing anything concerning
>> > > > the at-spi access to the terminal (except its width). Is this with
>> > > > brltty 6.3?
>> > > 
>> > > Yes, this is with brltty 6.3 on Debian Bullseye.
>> > 
>> > Ah but this wasn't with the vte patch, right?
>> 
>> Yes, this was with the unpatched version of libvte. There was no patched
>> version of any package in use, just the packages from the last Debian
>> Bullseye RC installer.
>
>Ok, then please try the libvte-2.91-0 package version 0.62.3-1+atspi
>from this repository:
>
>deb https://people.debian.org/~sthibault/tmp/bullseye-tmp ./

I've installed the patched lib now and some quick tests showed no differences to the unpatched version :-(.

Aditional to the doubble speech problem  when two brltty instances are running there are the following issues when working with brltty in the Mate terminal:

- With programs that have a constantly changing status bar or something similar the braille focus is set to this line. This happens in vim, in a tmux terminal, e.g.. It only happens when the braille focus is near this status bar, e.g. when a file is opend in vim and if you scrol down and the cursor is moving to the button of the screen. In a pure textbased environment I do not have this problem.
- Sometimes the braille output is not refreshed allthough the content of the screen has changed. I have this very ofthen when using mutt via a ssh connection on my server. I use nano as editor and if I delete lines with Strg + k the deleted dows not disapear. They only way to get out of this situation and get a refreshed screen is to leave the editor and open the file again. This refreshing problems are the most anoying and they do occure not only in ssh session, but also when edeting local files, but I have the feeling that in ssh sessions they occure more ofthen.
- When scrolling very fast through a screen with the arrow keys or the routing keys of my braille device (Handytech Braillestar 80) brltty is crashing. After such a crash the normal start message is displayed on the brailledevice for a few seconds then everything is working again.

I still think to use Mate terminal for textbased work would be a nice solution to not have the trouble to setu up also speech for the pure textbased console and to not have to deal with all the pulseaudio based problems such a setup requires. For that reason I'd be really happy  if the described problems can be solved. The biggest problems are not the doubble speech thing, but the the described problems with braille output.

I've also tested to get brltty running in xterm or uxterm, but I had no success :-(. I've heard the starting sound of brltty and there are two brltty instances running, but I got no braille output. Also killing all brltty instances and only start one instance as root did help. Has anyone an idea how to start brltty in a xterm or uxterm environment?

Cheers and thanks for all your support,

  Schoepp