[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Jason J.G. White]

On 6/5/25 12:53, Sébastien Hinderer wrote:
> Okay interesting, thanks! Do you use Orca or BRLTTY to read the content
> of those gnome terminals then?

Orca, with BRLTTY handling the Braille display. I'm planning to work on 
restoring the BRLTTY support for graphical terminals at some point 
though, which isn't currently working for me in Wayland sessions, but I 
haven't taken the time to investigate. Orca now runs quite reliably 
under Wayland, with some bugs still being fixed.

I've largely moved to Thunderbird for mail - too many HTML messages made 
text-based mail less productive than it used to be, especially if you 
want to follow links conveniently while reading. There are some 
annoyances, though. I'm using graphical Web browsers exclusively - 
text-based browsers are supported by few of the Web sites that I want to 
access. This will be everybody's situation sooner or later, as the Web 
is centrally focused on JavaScript and APIs now. It's so complex that 
there are only two or three implementations (and the third 
implementation - WebKit - reportedly isn't keeping up with Chromium or 
Firefox.)

I think of it this way: GUI apps have largely replaced ncurses apps in 
my daily usage, but not the power of the shell prompt, which I rely on 
heavily.

For text editing, it's still largely Emacs and Vim due to the keyboard 
interfaces that they offer.