[BRLTTY] Re: Debian-Installer with BRLTTY (USB) test report

[Jason White]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2007 at 11:06:51PM +0100, Mario Lang wrote:
 
> The main problem here is that BRLTTY solely depends on the
> keys provided by the display, and since display design
> varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, key combinations
> vary from driver to driver.  I see some ways to improve the
> current situation:
> 
> * Provide driver specific help files on mielke.cc/brltty.
>   We could write some makefile targets to export .hlp files
>   to a HTML representation.  However, the currentl .hlp
>   data is pretty terse and plain ASCII.  Some files assume
>   some prior knowledge by the user, i.e. key labeling
>   conventions usually provided in user manuals.

Perhaps this could be solved by an overview page which describes each braille
display, the key layout, and links to the help file for the details.
Subscribers to this list who have access to various displays could contribute
the brief descriptions.
> * If we get keyboard input support in the core, we
>   could bind some basic commands to persistant shortcuts.
>   This would make these initial configurations a bit
>   more standard.

This is a good idea, but preferably not as the default. One of the advantages
of using BRLTTY is that one doesn't have to be concerned with possible
keyboard conflicts, pass-through keys and the related issues that speech
software has had to deal with for ever. Even if there is a key combination to
invoke help, the user still needs to know what keys to press on the braille
display to read the help text, unless those are mapped to keyboard cursor keys
as well.

Would a user-space mechanism for invoking help, and the preferences menu, be
useful? Clearly this would require protocol access to these functions.

Whatever is done, it would need to be documented in the README files of
installation media, installation manuals, etc., but that's an issue for the
distributions to sort out.