[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Thanks a lot Jason for your response which I find veryinteresting.

Jason J.G. White (2025/05/06 13:25 -0400):
> 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.

So you do'nt miss all BRLTTY's power to follow the terminals?

I mean, I understand you do to some extent, otherwise you wouldn't write
about restoring it.

> I'm planning to work on
> restoring the BRLTTY support for graphical terminals at some point
> though,

If I were you I'd wait a bit as there still are some glitches that need
to be fixed. It's an on-going effort though.

> which isn't currently working for me in Wayland sessions, but I haven't
> taken the time to investigate.

May I asked what it was that made you switch from X to wayland?

> 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.

I certainly agree this is a hindrance. Actually it is one of the reaosns
whichmakes me seriously consider moving to graphical terminals, but I
have the hope that I will be able to continue to use mutt there because
I hope it will become possible to click on links in a graphical terminal
and that they then get opened in the graphical web browser.

By the way, it was in my head to ask whether it would be possible to
make links clickable in the virtual consoles, too. I have no idea
whether the question even makes sense, though. Nicolas, if you are
reading this, I guess this question is for you, somehow.

> 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.)

Yeah I agree. I still use lynx though, either for quick searches, or to
read Wikipedia, but even there I can see myself missing the structural
navigation. Still, I find the braille rendering of such pages better
with Lynx than with Orca + a graphical browser.

Seb.