[BRLTTY] BRLTTY in GRUB

Dave Mielke dave at mielke.cc
Fri Mar 16 15:53:57 EDT 2012


[quoted lines by Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko on 2012/03/16 at 20:33 +0100]

>I've disabled following warnings used in GRUB for brltty part:
> -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-field-initializers -Wunused-parameter
>-Wshadow -Wsign-compare

Perhaps I don't have those enabled. Would you like me to ensure they're enabled 
in my environment, and then to resolve all of them?

>I've just checked with linux terminal, gnome-terminal and mlterm and
>only mlterm got Hebrew (on screen) right, all others have written it
>from left-to-right. Perhaps I just miss a software component. So this
>doesn't give much info as to how it should be done.
>According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Braille
>braille in Hebrew is read from left-to-right. This creates a weird
>situation with screen-reading solution that you have to get it wrong
>on screen to get it right on braille.
>Similar situation with Arabic: http://libbraille.org/arabic_alphabet.php
>For GRUB it won't be any problem as I can easily make GRUB to do bidi
>on visual terminal and don't reorder it on braille.

Or just render it properly and leave it to us to find a solution. We;ll clearly 
have to, anyway, for other environments.

Whichever way you do it, for now, we'll just produce braille in the same order 
as the screen gives it to us.

>>There are conflicts, of course. There's only so much that can be done with
>>eight dots. Each language has a brltty text table which defines the way users
>>of that language like their braille to be represented.
>Does it create any problem with gettext in presence of untranslated
>strings, identifiers and latin filenames?

I believe most languages include a way to represent the basic Latin characters. 
That just ends up being a kind of necessity.

In general, what tends to happen is that they just know which language they're 
reading at the moment. It's just something a braille user gets used to since 
conflicts are just a pat of the way it is.

>That makes me indeed curious. In China they use same characters for
>the same concepts but they're pronounced differently in different
>parts of China. But I see only zh-tw (Mandarin, Traditional
>characters). Also I don't see any zh-cn, so I suppose that braille
>user has to set his computer to use traditional characters even
>though everyone around him uses simplified characters. Do these
>problems really exist? Is it because it takes a lot of work to make
>Chinese contraction tables?

I imagine it does. A user in Taiwan has put together the tables we have. I 
believe he's also given us a table for simplified Chinese, but I forget what 
it's called at the moment.

Of course, there may be tables we know nothing about which people or 
organizations have developed privately but not shared with us.

>>Is it possible to place the cursor on the selected item? That'd make it really
>>easy.
>>
>We already do so unintentionally. 

:-)

>We can upgrade this to intentional behaviour.

That'd be cool. You may remember the cursor tracking feature I told you about. 
Cursor placement is a very good technique to guide the user to the selected 
line.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario   | 2011 May 21 is the End of Salvation.
EMail: dave at mielke.cc | Canada  K2A 1H7   | http://Mielke.cc/now.html
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