[BRLTTY] brlTTY support for OpenBSD?

[Mario Lang]

eric oyen <eric.oyen at gmail.com> writes:

> accessing after setup is doable after a fashion. However, I want to be
> able to have physical access at the keyboard and CLI prompt.

BSDs do not have any interface for user space applications to read the
content of the console.  Linux has /dev/vcsa, which is what BRLTTY is
primarily using to access the text console.  Since BSDs do not have an
equivalent of such a device, the only way to get BRLTTY running in a BSD
text console is to use a patched GNU screen, and run all applications
you want to see via Braille inside of that screen session.

This worked nicely when I ported BRLTTY to OpenBSD back in 2004 or so.

However, I have not used OpenBSD since, so the ports package for BRLTTY
went stuck at BRLTTY version 3.6 since no one else was willing to pick my work
up.

> I have already discussed this on the OpenBSD forums and even advised
> some of the devs of the issue I have and what I would like.  A few of
> them are amendable to the idea but don't know whats available that can
> be adapted to OpenBSD. I considered BrlTTY first as it happens to be
> one of the more publicized projects.

As explained above, in principle, BRLTTY is already ported, although it
hasn't been tested on OpenBSD in a long time, so there might be some
minor issues to tackle.  You will need to use GNU screen though.

If you want to be able to access the native console, you will have to
convince OpenBSD kernel developers to implement /dev/vcsa for OpenBSD.
However, it is likely that they are seeing this as a security concern,
and probably will not want to do so. At least thats what we have seen in
the past when we tried to convince the BSD community that such a device
is necessary for console screen reading.

> anyway, I thought I would ask here.

Good idea! :-)

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