[BRLTTY] contracted braille input on linux, what is needed?

[kendell clark]

hi all
I've been in a lot of discussion with a couple of new linux users, and 
they have brought up that braille input, that is, typing on the braille 
keyboard of your braille display or note taker, does not work for grade 
2. Computer braille does work, but only if xbrlapi is started. This, in 
my opinion, and I'm not complaining whatsoever, is a little bit 
complicated. I'm not sure  what xbrlapi does, but I'll pass that buy for 
now. I have a couple of questions I'm not sure of the answers. First, is 
there any interest in adding support for contracted braille input? This 
is supposed to work with nvda on windows but I cannot confirm since I no 
longer use windows, and in any case nvda uses it's own braille drivers, 
and not much of brltty. Second, if xbrlapi is needed, could there be 
code in brltty to detect when you are in an x or wayland session and 
auto start it if brltty is running? This would drastically improve 
brltty's ease of use, because as of now you are required to copy an 
autostart desktop file somewhere in brltty's source tree into the proper 
place in ~/.config/autostart, which is not user friendly for new users. 
I've also been getting  frequent requests for an auto word wrap feature, 
where if a word is too long to fit on the display it will instead appear 
on the next line, without needing to press the scroll keys or a cursor 
routing key to scroll the line. I'm not sure how easy this would be to 
implement or even if this is the job of brltty and not screen readers 
such as orca, nvda, jfw, whatever. My last question is regarding 
brltty's support for policy kit. Would it be possible to set brltty to 
use policy kit by default, so that displays are plug and play? This is 
of course configurable, but if this were done a user could simply plug 
their display in and brltty would work, whether in the console or the 
gui. This is partly a brltty issue, and partly a distro packaging issue. 
For all I know brltty is already set to use policy kit by default, but 
the various brltty packages haven't been updated to include the proper 
policy kit rule file. I don't like writing such a long email that's so 
convoluted, but I've got some very unhappy users who don't like 
configuring things, and when told to they say things like "my display 
should just work" and "it's not fair", so I'm trying to help them. I do 
agree with them that this stuff should be easier, but again I'm not sure 
if this is brltty's burden or the screen readers or accessibility toolkits.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Kendell Clark

-- 
Kendell Lee clark
Package maintainer, software tester, image builder
Vinux project
http://www.vinuxproject.org.
Free software is not a luxury, it is a necessity.