[BRLTTY] Choosing a suitable braille display

[Jason White]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 12:43:15PM +0000, Michael Whapples wrote:
> I probably will look at these as well, I find it quite good having the
> buttons on the front of the ALVA which could be operated from nearly any
> position on the display. I wonder how this type of system compares to
> the buttons at the end like on the braillient (as I have only used the
> front buttons type display in the past). 

It very much depends on your work habits, in particular on how you prefer to
use the device in carrying out daily tasks. I find the keys of the
Brailliant/Supervario convenient to press after reaching the end of a line,
which is by far the most common circumstance. In many other cases, my next
action after pressing a key combination is to start reading a line from the
beginning, and in this situation having the keys just to the left/right of the
display doesn't create any difficulties. In addition, it enables 63 possible
commands to be issued from the six display keys.

The old DOS driver for the Baum INKa allowed the user to assign functions to
groups of ten optical sensors; the optical sensors were used primarily for the
same purpose as routing buttons, but it was also possible to assign arbitrary
commands to each adjacent group of ten sensors. As a result, it was quite
convenient to associate the previous window and next window commands with the
first and the last ten sensors, respectively, on the line, which could be
activated without moving one's hand from the display area. BRLTTY doesn't
allow this degree of flexibility, and most recently manufactured displays
don't have optical sensors however. I still value my INKA, which is a very
well designed piece of hardware.