[BRLTTY] Questions about refreshabraille and about running brltty for two displays

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Jason White on 2012/10/24 at 18:55 +1100]

>For any display that has six keys (three to the left and three to the right)
>which can be pressed in any combination, the Baum key bindings are a great
>starting point.

Yes, I essentially agree.

>For example, it appears that the bindings for the new HumanWare displays are
>based on the Baum key bindings for the top keys, so if I were to buy one, the
>commands would already be familiar from having used Baum displays extensively.

Yes, that's exactly what's been done for the HumanWare models.

>Obviously I am going to claim that this kind of consistency is good and
>desirable, other considerations being equal. While admitting my bias (see
>above), I think the point still stands. 

You have a good bias. Nothing wrong with that.

>I don't know the physical layout of a
>refreshobraille, but one way to proceed would be to make the Baum key bindings
>the default for the top keys, then assign commands to the other controls and
>make changes as needed. That's only a suggestion, of course, and there could
>be good reasons not to follow it, depending on how the device is designed.

Even APH understood that, which is why they simulate the six Baum top keys if 
the joystick is pressed while a combination of the six dot keys is used.

The difficulty, here, is that those six keys provide a real braille keyboard. 
They even use the Baum keyboard packet (unless the joystick is pressed). The 
RefreshaBraille has been intentionally designed to be an input device with very 
simple navigation. It essentially has the six dot keys, a space bar, and two 
function keys which actually serve as dots 7 and 8. Then, it has a five-way 
oystick. That's about it.

At the moment, the biggest thing that's wrong from a screen navigation 
perspective is that the joystick emulates the four arrow keys rather than 
invokes braille window movement. It had to be done that way at the outset, but, 
now that we have key tables, this should be corrected. It was an issue I was 
well aware of, way back when, but also one that I'd quite forgotten about. I'll 
now be fixing this within the next few days.

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Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
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