[BRLTTY] Braille in CLDR

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Mon, 29 May 2006, Samuel Thibault wrote:

> Nicolas Pitre, le Mon 29 May 2006 11:18:30 -0400, a écrit :
> > 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.

What about people that, say, want to use a provided table but want to 
modify one or two characters.

Right now you just tell them to open /etc/brltty/text.<whatever>.tbl 
with their favorite editor and edit the file to their liking in a format 
already familiar to anyone who learned braille, and save it. That's all.

How do you do that with CLDR?

> 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.

But at least it has the advantage of not putting the burden on the user 
if the user wants to modify tables himself.

Maybe a converter should be available with all braille projects?

> Why shouldn't CLDR come into play here?

Because it tends to be against the KISS principle from which BRLTTY is 
increasingly and irrevokably getting away.  And that's really 
unfortunate.  Now what will happen if you don't have CLDR installed?

> > 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 ;)

To whom it may concern then.

> 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.

I'm not against a common pool of braille table definitions.

I however have concerns about CLDR actually being the best place for 
this.  Sounds like pinning a calendar witha nail gun.  There is 
certainly a much lighter way to achieve the same.


Nicolas