[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Hello Aura and all,

I have three questions about your message.

1. You mention several things that do not work, in particular in how
BRLTTY and Orca work together. Have tesethings already been properly
reported with good descriptions of how to reproduce the problem? I am
asking because (1) it's super important to help maintainers and, above
all, (2) I think this is a very untested area so indeed a bunch of
testing is required for us to reach a good or at least better situation.

2. You explain why you do not use speech output and I have been of yor
opinion ofr years, but did you already give BRLTTY's support of speech
output a try? I am asking because I used it for several months and now I
can no longer use it because a system upgrade broke my set-up, and it's
incredible how I miss it. The fact that it was BRLTTY which was driving
speech is the keypoiint here for me, as it provides a wonderful
synchronization with braille. It made me not only faster when I have to
consume huge volumes of information, but it also saved a lot of energy
and tiredness so I can only encourage anybody to experiment.

3. You mention that Orca is maybe not the best language
performance-wise. I am neither a Python suporter, or a Python enemy.
Thepoint I would like to share here is that I am unsure it's the
language in which Orca is written which creates the bootlenenck here. I
would suspect more the ATK/AT-SPI layers, but I may very well be wrong.
The thing is actually twofold: one the one hand there are many layers,
on the other hand it's unclear to me that they way accessibility events
and objects are transmitted are optimal. I actually suspect they are
not, especially for the terminal which should likely have its
dedicatedwidget rather than a simple multiline textarea as I believe is
the case currently.

I will let more knowledgeable people correct me where needed.

Seb.
i,
> 
> 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.)
>