[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi,

On 2025-05-06 at 19:41 +0200, Sébastien Hinderer <Sebastien.Hinderer at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
 > 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.

It actually does and is even a bit related to this bigger discussion.

The first option is to make mutt open your message in a text-based browser in
the same terminal window where mutt runs. This is the uninteresting option,
and I will not discuss it further.

The other option (which will make both mutt and the browser to be usable
simultaneously independent of each other) requires that you can create new
terminals. If you use plain virtual consoles, you can use openvt to create a
new console, where the browser will run. You can then use deallocvt to destroy
the console once the browser exits.

The other (more scalable) option is to use tmux, which can easily create new
terminal windows. This solution of course has the normal drawbacks related to
using tmux. One of them is that BRLTTY does not remember reading positions
for individual tmux windows/panes.

How this is related to this discussion? We could create a console-based window
manager using tmux, if we somehow can make BRLTTY aware of tmux window
switching. This is required both for making BrlAPI working and to track
reading positions per-terminal. This would be a good idea regardless of how we
otherwise improve Linux accessibility infrastructure as we would benefit from
these features within graphical terminal emulators as well.

-- 
Aura