[BRLTTY] Documentation for beginners

Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org
Mon Dec 22 10:06:23 EST 2008


Hello,

While packaging brltty for windows, writing the Debian documentation and
introducing people to Linux, I realized that there is not really some
short documentation for beginners.  The problem I also often meet is
that people happen to have a braille device, but do not have its manual.

This makes it quite difficult to "bootstrap" using BRLTTY, for a blind
person alone, but also for a blind person who goes to an install party
or joins a Linux User Group (LUG). Of course, there is plenty of
documentation in the BRLTTY manual, but it's quite frightening for a
beginner to first have to read it all, and for "braille beginners" (I
mean the people from LUGs or helping the install party who a priori do
not know about braille devices at all).  Yes, one doesn't need to read
it all to get started of course, but the information to get started is
quite deep in it.

Something that could be useful for instance would be for each kind
of device a description of its buttons (TL1+TL2+TL3 / TR1+TR2+TR3 is
not very explicit for instance, "just like in DOS/Windows" is not
either...), and then a small introduction about how to use BRLTTY,
notably how to enter command learning mode and the preference menu, and
basically browse the screen, no more (the rest can be learnt later).
Ideally that would be available on the web, so that installation
instructions for Debian could just reference it.

Samuel


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