[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Christian Schoepplein]

Hi,

On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 02:55:07PM +0300, Aura Kelloniemi wrote:
>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. 
>
>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.

I worked on the console for years but switched to grafical interface only 
two years ago. I am using Mate with Orca but because Orcas braille support 
is not really good, especialy in mate-terminal, I use brltty in atspi mode 
with a brltty instance running in user mode for my normal user. For 
speech I brltty is configured to use speech-Dispatcher. This solutionis OK 
for me and I do not miss the times where I was working in pure console mode 
or in both grafical and pure text environment and allthough there still 
some problems with libvte I am very happy with this setup.

There is only one big problem I was not able to solve... If brltty is 
running with root privileges like in a pure console setzup you can configure 
brltty also to be used via the normal keyboard. This does not work at all 
if you run brltty in user mode with the AtSi2 screen driver and I don't know 
why. If we would have such a keyboard mode brltty could be used much more 
efficient in mate-terminal even without a braille device and because brltty 
is so much better then the braille support of Orca this would make things 
much better. Also it would be possible to interupt speech output  via the 
keyboard which is not possible in some situations currently.

I agree with Aura in all points. Orca is fine for grafical applications and 
there are not much things I am missing, but I also have to admit that 
I've not yet tested a grafical environment with Wayland. And allthough I am 
happy with mate-terminal for my console based work I'd also like to try and 
use other programs for working on a shell.  The support for mate-terminal 
and libvte improved a lot, but there are still problems and this dependency 
to libvte seems not to be very good.

Ciao,

  Schoepp