[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi Adrian,

On 2025-04-01 at 12:03 +0200, "Adrian P. van Bloois" <adrian at pa0rda.nl> wrote:
 > WIth brltty we are perfectly capable of running a linux system. I have done
 > that professionally for 40 years and still do that for myself and as a
 > volonteer for the animal ambulaaance.

That is very respectable. I'd like to clarify the timing though that Linux
kernel was first released in 1991 and BRLTTY was not initially available.

 > I dont need a window manager, what I need is a better browser than lynx.

My initiative is actually not about deprecating Linux console support in
BRLTTY, not at all. My questions are more about how to handle the situation
where Linux console is getting deprecated by the kernel developers. The
console interface has not seen any major development for a decade at least.

I don't want to force anyone to move away from our beloved Linux VTs. My
initiative is about what is the best way to have braille accessibility in the
future.

I myself am not a fan of GUIs and my initiatie does not need to imply that in
the future we would need to use anything but completely text-based interfaces.
But the question about the backedn needs to be resolved.

Linux console nowadays does not draw to VGA text memory segment, but Linux
itself maintains a graphical frame buffer on which it renders the console. So
actually all of us are using a graphical display already. Using Wayland as a
backedn does not change this very much. This is a technical question, but it
has many usability implications as I detailed in my original message.

I want the future to be text too, but I want to raise discussion about how we
should react to the current state of the Linux/FOSS ecosystem.

-- 
Aura