[BRLTTY] Braille Display Protocol

[Shérab]

Hi Justin,

Tom Masterson (2019/12/19 08:45 -0800):
> On Thu, 19 Dec 2019, Justin Cunningham wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > > The difficulty is that integration with a screen reader, e.g.
> > > brltty, isn't ultimately very useful if there isn't any way to navigate the
> > > braille display around the screen.
> > 
> > I see I’ve been misinterpreting what a screen reader does. I always thought that the text that is displayed to you is the text that the mouse is currently hovering over. When I played around with NVDA, the narrator spoke the text being hovered over so I just assumed the same applied to Braille Displays but I must be wrong.
> > 
> > We’re just trying to show that the prototype also works independent of human input (e.g. right now, we have to manually type a character).
> 
> You are not entirely wrong.  A screen reader does dosplay what is under the
> cursor (mouse or otherwise).  However because speech and braille are limited
> to what they can show at one time you must be able to move around the screen
> to get the context of what you are looking at.  Thus the need for
> navigation.

To complete what Tom has explained, in the case of the Linux console for
instance, the mouse is not necessarily available. In such a case where
you have only the cursor, it would not be enough to be able to see only
the part of the screen that contains the cursor, because the cursor can
not always through the whole screen. Think of the shell prompt, for
instance. If you would be able to see only the cursor, then you would be
able to see only the prompt and what you are typing. You would not, for
instance, be able to read the lines that appear just above the prompt
and typically contain the result of your last command. That's why there
must be a way to visit the whole screen independently of the position of
the cursor and/or mouse.

hth,

Shérab.