[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi,

On 2025-04-14 at 20:55 +0300, Vsevolod Popov <sevapopov13 at gmail.com> wrote:
 > Could you please try using Xorg with Orca and Tmucs and tell us about 
 > your experience?

I have kind of done that already, but  here comes my rant. Apologies for repetition.

First of all, in my experience Orca is slow, non-responsive, crashes (or
freezes) several times a day, espeially when I hibernate/resume the system.
Orca's braille support is even less responsive than speech, and its braille
navigation support is far behind BRLTTY. Orca's braille support is probably on
par with Windows screen readers, but that is not a good comparison in my
opinion.

BRLTTY only works in those terminals which are based on the GNOME VTE library.
VTE has several bugs in its AT-SPI2 interface, and those have ont been fixed,
even though they have been reported. VTE also does not support extended
keyboard input, like xterm with CSI u escape sequences. VTE is also unable to
tell the AT-SPI2 what colour each glyph in the terminal window has. So if I
sometimes need to see, how an application uses colours (e.g. to detect focus),
it is not possible in the graphical environment.

BRLTTY does not render menus of the terminal emulator or desktop, and thus I
would need to rely on Orca to use them. But alas, Orca does not work with my
window manager. Also, interaction between BRLTTY and Orca does not work
flawlessly. Sometimes in a terminal, Orca somehow gets control of the braille
display even though BRLTTY should always have priority over Orca. This makes
terminals almost unusable.

Last, and maybe least, Orca and BRLTTY do not work with Wayland, which is
becoming the primary graphics engine in Linux desktop world. This prevents me
from using graphical terminals on mobile systems which rely on Wayland, such
as the Librem 5 phone.

 > Also, do I understand correctly that you use mainly a Linux Console 
 > together with BRLTTY and Espeakup as a screenreader or Emacspeak and 
 > don't really use the graphical environment?

I don't use speech output in any form. In my opinion it is cumbersome, always
reads something irrelevant, does not work with tables or indentation and
cannot switch language on the fly (I am not a native English speaker).

I started this thread in order to see, if there is interest for imrpving the
braille display support in graphical environment.

I also want to say that even though I have been criticizing Orca alot, I am
not saying it is bad piece of software. It helps me with Firefox, which I
unfortunately need to use sometimes. I wish all the best for Orca, but I do
not wish to contribute to Orca, as I believe it is written in a language not
performant enough for the task. (I might be wrong here, I haven't done any
profiling of Orca.)

-- 
Aura