[BRLTTY] BRLTTY, Android and ssh

[Jason White]

Mario Lang <mlang at delysid.org> wrote:
 
> Like Chrome.  Its a bit of a sad story how hackish "solutions" on
> Android seem to be.

ChromeVox has braille support already. I'm not familiar with the details yet,
but it's in the source code available from the repository. I wouldn't call
ChromeVox a hack - it's a deliberate decision to implement the assistive
technology in JavaScript instead of dealing with screen readers and
accessibility APIs on different platforms. I can find the published paper if
you're interested in the rationale. I'm not trying to defend or criticize
here, but only to point out that it's a design and implementation strategy on
the part of the developers, who think they can progress faster and innovate
more easily by writing their tool using Web technologies instead of requiring
changes to accessibility APIs and screen readers for multiple operating
systems.

For example, MathML is more easily supported if you don't have to wait for
mathematics-related accessibility API extensions to be agreed upon and
implemented across several operating systems. The alternative is thus to make
the text to speech (and the braille display capability) directly accessible
within the browser, which is essentially what ChromeVox relies on. No doubt
there are people who don't think this is the right solution - again, I'm not
arguing the case either way, but it is a strategy taken by people who know
exactly what they're gaining and losing by doing so, and who have been working
on accessibility for a long time in some cases.