[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Dear Aura,

Many thanks for having started this discussion.

I think I agree with everything you wrote so I am not going to
elaborate as it wouldn't bring anything interesting to the discussion.

I also believe that improving the situation on the GUI side, of course
including the support of graphical terminal emulators is the most
promising way to go.

Recently I started to experiment with Windows and I was surprised by the
poverty of braille support. Not that I have a lot of experience so I
would really like to be contracted on this point, but my feeling was
that for graphical widgets Orca's support for Braille is not much more
developed that what we have in Orca, if at all. And this in spite of the
fact that the community of users and developers of NVDA has noting to do
in size with our community, it's way way larger. And this does not even
mention the braille support you have with NVDA in a text terminal. To
me, there is just no possible comparison with what BRLTTY does. It's a
point I do not even manage to convey to visually impaired users of
Windows that do not know BRLTTY because, I think, they cannot even
imagine what we have.
(Again, I would love to be contradicted.)

The point I would like to make here is that, in my opinion, GUI and the
support of graphical terminals we have on Linux, as broken as it is now,
feels to me as the most promising alternative we have, even when
compared to other operating systems. It's also the most sustainable I
think, provided that we manage to get accessibility integrated in main
stream tools.

Regarding how this should be achieved, my intuition is that we do not
have the manpower to fix all the bugs we encounter etc. and that it
would be more reasonable to focus on reporting them as appropriately as
possible to make them at least easy to understand and reproduce for the
developers. And, I think we may try to speak louder by organizing
and coordinating ourselves so that, when a bug is reported, several of us
get involved in the discussion.

Seb.