[BRLTTY] attribute tracking, was re: Recommended live distribution

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2012, Klaus Knopper wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 07:07:00PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > On Wed, 19 Sep 2012, S. Massy wrote:
> > > I wonder what would be some reasonable use-cases for such "profiles".
> > > Can't come up with a whole lot off the top of my head. This is the kind
> > > of feature more useful for GUIs than consoles usually.
> > 
> > Heh.  That's probably why BRLTTY has been around for 16 years now 
> > without that feature.
> 
> If you would see brltty, as its name misleadingly suggests, merely as a
> "braille driver for text consoles", it surely could go along without
> adding any new features.

It indeed started as a braille only terminal access program in 1995, 
hence its name.  But BRLTTY certainly moved ahead quite a lot since 
then.

> Apparently, the people who develop and/or use SBL have missed something.
> For me, it was the keyboard-only navigation possibility at that time,
> enabling people who can't afford braille devices to access a computer,
> to accomplish this just by keyboard and soundcard that every computer
> has. Eventually, brltty added that feature later, too, so it seems there
> was demand for it.

Indeed.

> So, why not adopting profiles and self-defined
> attribute cursor tracking as well?  ;-)

Oh, don't get me wrong: I'm not against that at all.  I was only 
reflecting on the fact that such application profiles were never a high 
enough priority to existing BRLTTY users and/or developers.

It is unfortunate that the SBL developers decided to go their own way 
rather than contributing to an existing project as BRLTTY would 
certainly have had profile support for quite a while now.

But I'm not against seeing such features being added to BRLTTY.  I 
probably won't implement it myself though, as this is not something I 
really need.  If I had time to work on some accessibility related 
project right now that would be a text mode interface for the mumble 
client, and even that is not at the top of my priority list.

However, if someone is willing to incorporate SBL features into BRLTTY 
that would make an even better solution for both user bases.


Nicolas