[BRLTTY] brltty in termux on ipad?

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Fri, 26 Dec 2025, Dave Mielke wrote:

> Apple alread provides braille through VoiceOver. Is that inadequate in some way that brltty could improve upon?

I do use VoiceOver with speech only and it is mostly excellent. In 
general, accessibility feels much better on iOS than Android, even with 
Google's own apps.

The braille content provided by VoiceOver is analogous to what Orca 
provides on Linux. BRLTTY, being a braille backend, wouldn't bring 
anything more than what VoiceOver already does in that regard, other 
than supporting more braille devices.

About Termux on iOS:

The iOS apps named "Termux" (like Vinaeco's version) provide a Linux 
terminal simulator with:

- Standard Unix utilities (ls, grep, cat, nano, vim)
- Shell scripting support
- Directory navigation with Unix commands
- Touch-optimized interface

However, these appear to be pre-bundled command sets - you get commands 
that were included when the app was installed, but you can't add more 
packages like you can on Android Termux.

For a much Linux-like experience on iOS I recommend iSH instead. It is 
also fairly VoiceOver friendly.

iSH must perform software emulation due to iOS sandbox restrictions. It 
emulates x86 (32-bit) instructions as well as Linyux system calls 
providing a Linux-like user space environment. iSH comes with 
Alpine Linux's apk package manager by default so you can install more 
packages... including ssh for example.

You _can_ install and/or compile BRLTTY in iSH but it likely won't work 
as iSH does not implement the necessary abstraction to let userspace 
applications access USB or Bluetooth devices (and it is not clear to me 
if iOS would let iSH access them anyway).


Nicolas