[BRLTTY] [OT] Re: How doyou read books?

[Aura Kelloniemi]

Hi

Shérab <Sebastien.Hinderer at ens-lyon.org> writes:
 > Many thakns for your very interesting answer!

Thank you for your question.

 > Along time ago I also started to write a program to read books on my
 > braille device. The program was written in OCaml and its ideas were very
 > close to what you describe. Unfortunately I didn't maintain it and since
 > it seems less advanced than yours, I wouldn't mind at all giving it up
 > to collaborate with you.

Thanks. There have been some API changes in Python's regex module which I have
to update my program for. I also need to do some checking, and make the key
bindings somehow customizable - probably by editing a bunch of constants in a
Python script, but that's better than no customizability.

 > If there are no secrets in your code, would you mind making it available
 > on GitHub?

There are dreadful confessions about crimes that I did in my past lives
written into the doc strings of methods... No, not really. I will release it
when I have time to do some cleanup on the code.

I consider my program to be useful for reading files, but it has some inherent
limitations, e.g. the file being read has to fit in RAM at once. I don't think
that it would either be a good idea to start duplicating features of other
applications (like web browsers, directory managers, text editors, etc.) in
it, because it would be a huge effort. Also my program does not support
keyborad input from the TTY, so it is not very useful with braille devices
which don't have a braille keyboard.

As a result I'm not interested to develop this code very much. I would instead
want to write a BrlAPI interface for emacs, because emacs already supports a lot
of functionality. Emacs is pretty usable with braille display already, but it
could see a little bit of enhancement (e.g. using routing keys as a
replacement for the mouse).

But definitely I don't have anything against somebody else developing my code
further. Be warned though, that it has not been designed with extensibility in
mind.

 > It would also be nice if you could bemore precise about the kind of
 > improvemnets you would like to see in BrlAPI regarding the handling of
 > keys and commands.

You can read about this from a thread titled "[BRLTTY] BrlAPI Raw key code
mode?" started by Mario Lang on this mailing list on 23 Jul 2017 00:12:56.

-- 
Aura