[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Samuel Thibault]

Nicolas Pitre, le Mon 29 May 2006 11:18:30 -0400, a écrit :
> > At the Accessibility Free Standard Group meeting of last year, there was
> > an agreement that such a centralized information pool would be useful
> > for these screen readers.  For now, screen readers have very differing
> > localization support (just a quick list):
> > 
> > - brltty: cz, da, de, en_US, en_UK, es, fi1, fi2, fr_CA, fr_FR, it,
> > - gnome-braille: ar, cz, da, de, en_UK, en_US, es, fr_CA, fr_FR, hr, it, ja, ko, pl, ru, sv, vi,
> > - gnopernicus: de, en_US, es, sv
> > - libbraille: de, en_UK, en_US, es, fr, no-h, no-p, sv
> > no-h, no-p, pl, ru, se, vi.
> > - sbl: fr, de, en_US, en_UK, es, sv
> > 
> > People might be reduced to choose his screenreader according to the
> > braille table it has; that's a bit unfortunate...
> 
> Sorry but I just don't believe there can't be a simple, really simple 
> way to import braille table definitions from one application into
> another.

Of course there can.

> So saying that people's screen reader choice is limited by the available 
> braille table is rather dishonest given your own technical skills.

I'm taking into account _people_'s skill.

I myself added a2b support for letting brltty export its tables for
gnopernicus, but asking people to use tbltest for converting tables is a
bit tedious.  Installing/learning Linux is already a difficult task, the
additionnal burden of converting tables is really not welcome.

A solution would be to write converters now, and convert all brltty
tables into all other formats and submit them to other projects, and
vice-versa from all other projects.  Now, say that a brltty developper
writes a braille table for a yet non-covered language.  He will have to
convert and submit it to all other projects, which is quite tedious.

Why shouldn't CLDR come into play here?

> Braille didn't get invented last month.  Therefore no "standard" will 
> ever succeed if imposed on people that never used it in the first place.  
> Don't expect people to just use your "standard" just because you call it 
> so. Others have tried with Braille before and it didn't work. And no 
> standard has any value if it is not actually used.

Please note that I'm not the one who started the thread ;)

I don't think the goal of Erkki is to standardize braille or replace
brltty/etc. tables.  It is about including the best information
available in a common place for every braille producer: CLDR.  Of course
people will always prefer their own table and that's fine.  But default
ones (i.e. mostly agreed on) should be as much available as possible.
And CLDR is really a fine way for this.

> There are already many (maybe too many) established braille 
> standardization bodies world wide with the knowledge and field 
> experience.  And yet they are facing no end of issues with braille 
> standardization.  There is nothing to gain but more confusion from yet 
> another standards group coming along to "standardize" something that is 
> clearly not in its field of expertise.

As I don't really know the precise policy about this, this is more
a question for Erkki, but I guess CLDR's policy is not to claim
standardizing things, but rather to centralize existing standards for
easier programming.

Samuel