[BRLTTY] History of Brltty

[Rob]

Mario Lang <mlang at delysid.org> wrote:
> I'd like to take this opportunity and publicly thank Dave for the
> absolutely wonderful work he has been doing since he took maintainance
> over.
I second that. I came to Linux in--I think--about 2010, at which time I 
had no braille display and I was stuck using the E Squeak synthesizer. I 
think I started with grml, got put off by the speech and quit. You want 
me to listen to this? I don't think so.
Then I learned a little more and was able to access pre-built virtual 
editions of Linux (which you can find all over the place) through ssh. I 
then progressed to installing Arch Linux over the network and learned a 
little more still.
Finally in I think 2013, I got my first desktop display and was able to 
fire up Brltty for the first time. I was very confused at first because 
I was used to thinking in terms of the gui layout. Then I got the hang 
of braille windows and linear navigation.
finally, this year, I built a Linux From Scratch project ... mostly 
using Brltty. It was the first thing I installed in the chroot 
environment before rebooting. Brltty has saved my computing bacon many, 
many times when sound did not work, or when I had to troubleshoot drive 
problems before the sound card loaded, or when I had to install from a 
cd and did not want to deal with software speech. If my braille display 
died, I would be almost as lost as a sighty without his monitor. How 
funny is that?