[BRLTTY] make drivers a library?

[Hermann]

On 22.09.2009 at 14:58:10 Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Yet another person on the NVDA list wanted to re-implement a driver for
> some braille device because he doesn't want to have to run both brltty
> and nvda at the same time.
>
> Of course, it's a better thing to use the brlapi facility as this
> permits to run several readers, dedicated applications, etc. but for
> the casual user this seems superfluous considering the difficulty of
> installing both brltty and nvda (yes, I believe we got to a very simple
> way to achieve that, but two applications is still too much for casual
> users).
>
The problem here, I think, is, that Windows users are not familiar with
Brltty, and its concept to run as a service, allowing to use several
applications with it. They want to stick to the concept, known from
their screen readers, which come with everything needed, brail drivers
included.

> As a result, I yet more and more believe that brltty should export its
> drivers through a library too, even with an simple interface similar
> to libbrlapi/libbraille.  Else I fear dispersion of hardware support
> efforts.
>
What would be the difference? In my understanding, one has only to
copy/install a driver for only one display, looking like "libalva.so" or
"libht.so" (ht = Handytech). Am I right?

> What do people think?
>
If this makes the use of Brltty easier for Windows users, we should
think about it, since I don't believe that too many companies will develope
special drivers for NVDA.
Hermann