[BRLTTY] brltty in termux on ipad?

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Many thanks for the details you provide Nicolas,

Nicolas Pitre (2025/12/27 12:55 -0500):
> 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.

Indeed, and as far as graphical content and widgets are concerned, I
think what VoiceOver does, at least with speech, is great and it would
feel like a loss oftime to try and re-do something similar withBRLTTY,
not even mentionning that htere is no documentation on how to access the
widget's contents...

> 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.

And do you use itwish speech only, or also with VoiceOver's braille
support?

> 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).

Actually, as far as I am concerned, the thing that I'd like is the
ability to run Emacs on iOS and the ability to use it in braille as
comfortably as I do with BRLTTY on Linux. Do you see any reasonable way
to achieve this?

Perhaps a mode of BRLTTY where it would embed its own terminal
could help? Of course, that would mean that one may wnat to also deal
with displaying the terminal on the phone's screen, but in a way that
wouldnot have to be a priorityeither and could even be seen as an
advantage if you have on one side the active app that you handle
withVoiceOver and on the other side your system that you handle
with BRLTTY.

In case that wouldn'tbe possibleon iOS, I might consider having a second
portable device just for that, as I really feel something ismissing in
my organization in that I cannot easily read and editmy Org files. By
not easily I mean without using bothmy laptop andbraille device. Also, I
would like to always have a copy of themwithme, meaning not to have to
rely on network access.

Seb.