[BRLTTY] Braille keyboard layout

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Sébastien Hinderer on 2007/06/17 at 13:20 +0200]

>So far, I could work with two braille terminals. The first one had its
>"go to next window key" at the left of the display, where as the second
>one has it at the right end, more precisely under the last cells.
>Between these two, my personal preference goes to the first one. Trying
>to rationalize this, I came to the following explanation:
>when I read braille on paper, my indexes both read, say, the first half
>or one line. Then, the right one reads the second part of the line on
>its own, while the left one locates the beginning of the next line, thus
>helping the rihgt index to join this point of the page to continue
>reading. The first terminal, I felt, was well adapted to this process.
>Indeed, my fingers could work pretty much the same way on the terminal
>and on the paper, the only difference being that the left index had to
>locate the "goto next window" button instead of the beginning of the
>next printed line.
>With a "go to next window" button at the end of the display, though,
>things look different to me: my right index has to both read the end of
>the window on its own and to press the button, while theleft index
>uselessly waits at the beginning of the window.

I'd think, though, that with the first paradigm (next window on the left) ones
left index finger still needs to jump to the first cell after pressing the key
so there's still a delay. In fact, I'd expect the delay to be about the same
although it may feel different for at least two reasons. The first is that the
left index finger gets to start working when it's expected to, even if that
activity isn't immediate reading. The second is that the first cell with data
may be nearer the left end of the display than the last cell with data is to
the right end of the display.

I personally find that I dn't like displays with scrolling keys at the ends of
the cells. For reading, I like displays with long thumb-operated keys. As I
near the end of a line I start moving my left index finger to the left, usually
timing it so that it gets there just as my right index finger is reading the
last character. At that same moment a quick touch of my thumb allows me to just
keep on reading.

When it comes to searching for something, however, I find that I much prefer
the whiz wheels of the Freedom Scientific displays. They allow the user to
scroll the display rather intuitively.

The new HandyTech Evolution displays support finger pressure detection, and
brltty already has a hook for this. It might be interesting to experiment with
intelligent scrolling depending on what the user's fingers are doing.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | I believe that the Bible is the
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