[BRLTTY] Brltty and Orca

[Mario Lang]

Luca Saiu <lsaiu at hypra.fr> writes:

> Anyway the conversation, and some feedback by others, made me understand
> that Brltty is not an AT-SPI client, which was surprising to me.

BRLTTY is historically a console screen reader.  It does its thing by
reading /dev/vcsa on Linux, and presenting the current text console
content to the braille display user.  Since BRLTTY has a very complete
driver base, an API to it, the BrlAPI, was developed around 2000, and
later used by upcoming Linux graphical screen readers like Gnopernicus
and later Orca.  Whats happening here is, that BRLTTY is presenting the
console content to the Linux braille user as long as the text console is
active.  Once the user switches to a graphical interface like X11
running GNOME and Orca, BRLTTY will give up trying to present anything,
and just pass through commands to/from the currently running screen
reader for the graphical environment.  So while BRLTTY is always talking
to the braille display, it is not always responsible for what is
actually displayed.  As long as you are using in the text console,
it is solely responsible for the presentation.  Once you switch to a
graphical interface, where some other screen reader is actually
collecting the information from the desktop, it is merely functioning as
a braille driver.

-- 
CYa,
  ⡍⠁⠗⠊⠕