[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi,

On 2025-04-01 at 17:09 +0530, "Pranav Lal" <pranav at techesoterica.com> wrote:
 > First, please get up to speed on the GUI. It is a fact of life and it does
 > work in Linux. A lot of work is happening on the GUI side of things. Orca is
 > a capable screen reader and it does support braille via brltty. 

I use Orca everyday to access Firefox. I use the awesome window manager.

My experience is that Orca's terminal support (for braille) is painfully slow
and Orca's word wrapping repeats the word that gets split at the braille
window edge. Also Orca freezes for me daily and causes weird scrolling issues
in Firefox for sighted users.

BRLTTY's capability to render terminal contents as braille is significantly
better than Orca's.

Also Orca does not work well on Wayland. With my window manager Orca does not
speak anything. xbrlapi says "root window" while the menu of my window manager
is open, which is much more information than what Orca gives me. Orca, as a
Python application, is too slow to run on most mobile devices, and Orca does
not support phosh (the Phone Shell).

Running a full-fledged Desktop environment on my machine is not possible due
to low resources. Also, I don't want to run anything which is not very
customizable and lightweight.

I just share my experience, because it explains my standpoint, even though the
above is not necessarily relevant for the topic of my original message.

-- 
Aura