[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Elias Oltmanns]

Hi there,

similar to Sébastien, I would like to thank Aura for expressing quite
comprehensively a feeling of unease that has been forming at the back of
my mind over time. As a passionate braille user, I value the experience
provided by BRLTTY in the Linux console immensely. In fact, this is the
environment I feel most comfortable working in by far. So much so, that
I get easily annoyed or impatient with apps in a graphical environment
due to less snappy responses (on the braille display), seemingly
inconsistent panning behaviour, et cetera. In fact, I have wondered
whether it is just me not having spent enough time on getting used to a
different environment and tuning it to my liking. There likely is some
truth in that, which would be a relief, but Aura's summary seems to
confirm my suspicion that there is more to this.

Being a developer myself with some experience in contributing to various
foss projects in the past, I feel a growing responsibility to figure out
how and where I can help with regard to the accessibility for braille
users under Linux as myself, which has not been a focus of mine so far.
So, I find a candid discussion as this one very helpful and motivating,
even though it makes me realise too, that I can only offer very little
as an individual in comparison to the seasoned developers in that field
and the work in front of us. So, I shall do some research on what others
may already have found out about the reasons for that unpleasant
experience of using Emacs in a graphical terminal compared to the
console and similar stuff. May be, I can find something I can work on
and I certainly will follow this and similar discussions attentively.

Best regards,

Elias


On 2025-04-01 at 20:22:58 (+0200), Sébastien Hinderer <Sebastien.Hinderer at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> 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.