[BRLTTY] Update on QWERTY Keyboard

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Rob on 2019/01/04 at 15:00 -0600]

>So, in essence, there's nothing really we can do to make it work.

For HIMS qwerty, yes. I can only guess, but suspect that they may have made
their decisions on this kind of stuff based on NVDA - i.e. on what they
observed being done on Windows. NVDA, as I understand it, uses six-dot literary
braille as translated via LibLouis. This's fine, of course, but it means that
issues pertaining to eight-dot computer braille were probably not considered.

>It seems kind of a shame, because you have to lift your hands off the display
>to do things. But, I guess, braille displays were not initially designed for
>such efficiency. The protocols therefore do not allow for such key codes to be
>sent, because, hey, it's a braille device and thus should send braille dots.
>That makes sense from a design standpoint, but kind of not fun from a user
>standpoint. 

Not exactly. Many braille displays handle qwerty keyboards much better. The
best, in my opinion, is when they simply send the raw key events to the driver
because that allows brltty to put it altogether properly. So, the bottom line
is to not give up on braille displays getting qwerty modifiers right just
becuase one (or a few) don't get it right. Many do.

A note to any braille display manufacturers who just might be monitoring this
list: In my opinion: Keyboards, be they braille or qwerty, which send
characters, be they text or dot combinations, rather than key events are also
causing problems because they don't allow their users to configure host-defined
keyboard layouts.

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