[BRLTTY] Newbie questions to help me make a Slint installer blind friendly.

[Didier Spaier]

Hi everybody,

As this is my first post in this list, let me introduce myself.

I am a retired French project management consultant living in Paris, a
Slackware user active on 
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/
and lead the Slint project, cf. http://slint.fr, that provides polyglot
installers and administrative tools for Slackware.

The Slint project gave me the occasion of diving into the Slackware
installer where I now feel "at home", so when I saw the following message
in a Slackware mailing list:

 >I'm using gnu/linux since about twelve years and I plan to move from
 >debian/testing that I'd always used to slackware because of systemd. But
 >before doing this, I'd like to ask a elementary question.
 >
 >Being blind, I first want to know if installation is accessible, that 
is to
 >say, does brltty is part of the packages? I didn't found it in the list of
 >the packages (slackware64) but maybe I'm wrong? I'd like to install by
 >myself without the help of a sighted person. Somewhere (but I cann't
 >remember where) I saw that speakup was present but I don't know if it 
speak
 >french...

I took that as an interesting challenge, knowing that currently the
Slackware installers do not ship brltty.

So the aim is to allow a blind user to install Slackware without the help
of a sighted person, using brltty.

A bit of context: the Slackware installer is a text installer that uses
mostly the "dialog" ncurses based application as UI, cf.
http://invisible-island.net/dialog/

The Linux console/ttys are used, but in the current stable version a
framebuffer can be used if available and appropriate.

In the polyglot Slint installers, whenever possible (i.e., if a usable
framebuffer is present, that is checked first) we use a true type font,
displayed without relying on a X server thanks to fbterm, cf.
https://code.google.com/p/fbterm/
If no "good" framebuffer is available, or if the user don't want to use
fbterm (setting "fbt=n" in the command line) we fall back to using a
plain Linux console/tty and a bitmap font.

Other difference with the genuine installer, we use UTF8 locales during
installation.

I Have read this page:
http://mielke.cc/brltty/guidelines.html

I also had quick look at how a few installers deal with brltty's usage.

Here are my questions:
1. Can brltty be used with the "dialog" program?
2. Can brltty be used in a framebuffer?
3. Does the usage of a true type font for visual display has consequences
    regarding brltty?
4. Can brltty be used with in an UTF8 context? Under what conditions and
    with which limitations?

Thanks in advance for any advice, answer, clue, pointer, suggestion.

Please take in account that I am a pure newbie in that field, so do not
hesitate to state the obvious.

Best regards,

Didier