[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Vsevolod Popov]

Hello,

14.04.2025 21:43, Aura Kelloniemi пишет:
> 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.

This is really interesting observation. I have never experienced that on 
my machines at least frequently.

> 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.

I didn't know that Orca and BRLTTY separately in console work 
differently since I didn't use console much, only when I needed to 
repare something if Xorg didn't work or Orca didn't work there for some 
reason after my experiments. As far as Wayland and Orca, Gnome 48 has 
Wayland support for Orca and as far as people told me it works well now. 
I am not sure about BRLTTY.

> 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).

That is really impressive!
I was never able to use braille without speech. I think this is because 
I was not taught like that in childhood and in Russia braille display is 
not an often thing. I started actively using braille for working with 
computers 4 years ago when I already was 21 and I found that using 
braille without speech was not fast because I have to move hands from 
keyboard to braille display.
As far as working with indentations you are right, it is more convinient 
when you also have a braille representation of it but I don't get what 
you mean about tables and braille, how they can be represented.
Does BRLTTY have something for that?
Thankk you!

--
Regards,
Vsevolod
https://github.com/sevapopov2