[BRLTTY] Emacspeak and Braille displays

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Rich Morin on 2016/06/14 at 10:31 -0700]

>Sorry; "(ducks)" is shorthand for
>
>  "I'm ducking my head, in case the responses I get are negative."

The only one who may need to duck his head around here is myself whenever 
stupid bugs slip through. :-) That being said, I myself don't believe in head 
ducking, excuse making, etc. Just simple honesty and taking responsibility.

>Here is a bit of background, to get us well started.  Amanda Lacy has
>a MacBook Air, running OSX.  Her display, a HumanWare Brailliant BI40,
>connects to the Air via USB.

Brltty does support the Brailliant BI 40. There've been some problems, though, 
but they've been fixed in the development code and shall be in release 5.4 
which should be released next week.

>Although I didn't find any information on using BRLTTY with OSX, it
>is written in C and already works with Linux and OpenBSD, so porting
>it (if need be) is unlikely to be too difficult.

Brltty already builds for Maac OS X. Its one big limitation on that platform is 
that it can't directly read the screen's content as it does on Linux. What our 
Mac OS X users do is to apply a patch that we supply to the screen program. 
That patch causes screen to maintain an image of the screen content within a 
shared memory segment that brltty knows how to interpret.

We do have Mac OS X users of brltty on this list. Perhaps one of them can offer 
you more direct help.

If you're familiar with programming for Mac OS X, and if you know how brltty 
could read the screen content directly, then your help would most definitely be 
appreciated so that this capability could finally be implemented.

>Alternatively, it may be that Apple's built-in Braille support can do the job:

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's VoiceOver already supports the Brailliant BI 
40. If it does then you may still want to use both it and brltty - i.e. brltty 
for terminal windows and VoiceOver for graphical ones. That'd be a matter of 
user preference.

>The other issues we face have to do with Emacs and Emacspeak.  Emacs
>divides the screen into "buffers", each of which can contain text.
>So, we need a way to display the current line of the current buffer.

I myself much prefer vim, but there are many Emacs users on this list. Perhaps 
they can address your concerns. Maybe post a list of Emacs-specific questions 
with a subject that'll grab their attention.

-- 
Dave Mielke           | 2213 Fox Crescent | The Bible is the very Word of God.
Phone: 1-613-726-0014 | Ottawa, Ontario   | http://Mielke.cc/bible/
EMail: Dave at Mielke.cc | Canada  K2A 1H7   | http://FamilyRadio.org/