[BRLTTY] brltty in termux on ipad?

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Dave Mielke (2025/12/26 13:45 -0500):
> [quoted lines by Sébastien Hinderer on 2025/12/26 at 19:32 +0100]
>
> >I certainly agree that one must bevery strongly motivated to
> >developforiOS.
>
> My motivation to do development isn't a problem. When it comes to iOS, though, I have at least two questions:
>
> Apple alread provides braille through VoiceOver. Is that inadequate in
> some way that brltty could improve upon?

I must apologize for an answer that is not going to be precise, but this
is because I did not try hard to use VoiceOver's braille support, and it
has been a long time ago that I tried.

I found the support not reactive at all, and basically the braille
presentation not super interesting. In what I can remember, what they do
is that they send to the braille display exactlywhat is spoken, which is
what other speech-centered screen readers like NVDAtend todo. I speak
freely here but withhte hope to be corrected if others have more recent
experiences.

> Especially now that I no longer have a professional income, I'm in no
> hurry to spend a great deal of money on a device that I dno't need and
> wouldn't use other than for development.

Sure it makes perfect sense to me that you are careful on whether you
should invest money into this or not.

I don't even know whether it would be possible for something else than
VoiceOver to take control of thebraille device. I would assume so,
tough, as it is possible on macOS.

> On top of that, to ensure that brltty is really working properly
> everywhere it needs to I'd have to purchase some sort of mobile plan
> so that phone calls, etc would work.

Well, yes and no. I mean, assuming you had a phone, I think you could
already go pretty far without using the phone app itself, because the
widget it uses are used elsewhere.

> >That point had been discussed on the issue. TheTermux people indeed said
> >that they were notusing Android's text view and were drawing everything
> >by themselves. Taht was a surprise to me because, on the one side they
> >certainly know what they are talking about, but on the other side I was
> >able to see something, and I don't know how that owould have been
> >possible at all if they were not using the textview at all.
>
> Okay, it's coming back to me. If I'm recalling correctly, they're
> setting what Android calls the content description with the text
> that's on the screen. This would enable you to know what's on the
> screen but wouldn't have a cursor.

That very well describes whatI have experimented at thetime, yes. For
what it matters, what I did was to pluga braille display to a friend's
Androidphone, where both Termux andBRLTTY were installed.

> So, if my memory is correct, it's termux that's broken and there isn't
> anything we can to do address the issue.

Well, I agree that, as far as BRLTTY itself is concerned, there's
nothing we can do. What we could do would be submitting patches to
termux, andthat's what I would have liked to do if it wasn't that
difficult given where I start from. I know either Java, nor Android
developemnt so that felt quite a hill to climb.

> What's their excuse for not doing it properly? Just a guess, but they
> probably simply want some fancy-looking font. :-(

That's basically how I understandthings, yes. Although I would have
phrased them differently. My guess is that, when they did it initially,
they indeed wanted something that was looking nicebut at thesame time
they were not aware of the consequences their choice wouldhave in terms
of accessibility. Andthen thihsissue was opened, maybe that's howthey
realised, but I am guessingthat it was then "too late", in the sense
that it would have been much more work to do things correctly once they
had been done not correctly, rather than to do them correctly in the
first place.

In my opinion, this is a super sad situation because not being able tu
use a really mobile Linux is, at least in my personallife, quite a
hindrance.

But so far I could never figure out a wya to makethisevolve in a
positive direction.