[BRLTTY] Footsteps towards better accessibility in Linux

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Tue, 6 May 2025, Sébastien Hinderer 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. Nicolas, if you are
> reading this, I guess this question is for you, somehow.

If you mean any links anywhere on the screen regardless of the 
foreground application then the short answer is no. Doesn't mean it is 
not doable though.

Right now it is the application that must give links some meanings and 
give you the ability to activate them. This is what alpine does for 
example. Maybe emacs/vi can activate links somehow too but I don't know 
enough about either to say for sure (I would be surprised if they 
couldn't somehow).

But if you wanted for any links anywhere on the virtual console to be 
clickable, say, with a mouse regardless of the running foreground 
application then you could write a fairly simple daemon program to 
monitor the screen content via a /dev/vcs device, just like BRLTTY does, 
to detect the presence of links and launch the browser of your choice 
when they're "clicked". The selecting/clicking of links could be done 
with the keyboard as well using some special hot keys too, again just 
like BRLTTY does.

Personally, I'm happy enough with BRLTTY's cut-and-paste to copy a link 
into lynx. And when lynx can't cut it then I just use my iPhone which is 
way-way more frustration free than any GUI accessibility on Linux has 
ever been for me, even better than Android accessibility for that 
matter. I now have iOS "shortcuts" to move clipboard content back and 
forth between my iPhone and Linux which makes pasting links into Safari 
from Linux almost seamless.

But for my day job I use the Linux VT console exclusively. There is 
nothing that comes close to the efficiency and ease of use I get from 
that work environment. And I intend to do my best to help keep it alive 
and kicking for as long as I can, beyond that I hope I'll be retired.


Nicolas