[BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?
Rob Hudson
captinlogic at gmail.com
Thu Nov 17 11:31:48 EST 2011
I'm all for braille support, but doesn't that sorta defeat the purpose of a
mobile phone? Not discouraging, just asking questions.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nolan Darilek" <nolan at thewordnerd.info>
To: <BRLTTY at mielke.cc>
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 10:16 AM
Subject: [BRLTTY] Would BRLTTY be of use on Android?
> Hi folks. Some of you may know me from my work on Android. In particular,
> I've written the Spiel screen reader (http://spielproject.info) and a few
> other Android apps.
>
> During the early part of this year, I worked with National Braille Press
> on their Android notetaker project. Work died down in June but seems to be
> picking up again, and we seem to be focusing on Braille on the Android
> platform.
>
> There is currently no Android Braille API, but I think we're considering
> creating one, at least until Android supports it natively. I'm wondering
> if BRLTTY might be a good candidate for supporting this?
>
> I've read enough of the list archives to know that there isn't a port to
> Android. The bottleneck here seems to be that no one on the team has an
> Android device with which to work. If you did have an Android device,
> would someone have cycles to look into a port?
>
> I'm also wondering if BRLTTY would fit some of the higher level
> requirements of such an API? No one wants to edit config files or start
> daemons on their phones. Until Braille display support gets baked in
> natively, I'm envisioning users having to pair a bluetooth display as they
> would a regular device, then firing up some GUI that probes all connected
> bluetooth devices, determines which are Braille displays and makes them
> available in a list for the user to choose. Does BRLTTY have any sort of
> device scanning mechanism that can ping a wildcard list of devices and
> return which are Braille displays plus any relevant stats?
>
> Also, does BRLTTY/BRLAPI do its own grade 2 translation, or do I need a
> separate library for that?
>
> My intention is to ship a low-level Braille API and associated service
> that communicates between higher-level apps and Braille displays. I think
> that if we can cross-compile BRLTTY for Android, then ship the binary as a
> resource within the service, then the Android app can run a BRLTTY
> instance and handle communication. My understanding is that BRLAPI
> communicates with a running BRLTTY daemon. It might be easier if this
> daemon could communicate over STDIN/STDOUT rather than a port on
> localhost.
>
> Anyhow, if this seems like a promising project then I might be able to
> secure Android hardware for anyone who feels confident that they can
> attempt a port. Given that the use case is phones and tablets, we're
> probably limited to bluetooth displays, which may or may not be an issue.
>
> Thanks for reading.
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