[BRLTTY] What is the best way to deal with Unicode characters?

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Sat, 28 Sep 2019, Shérab wrote:

> It is perhaps something one just has to live with, I don't know. Just
> trying to share some thoughts here. Perhaps we should communicate
> towards our sighted colleagues that these unicode characters are simply
> not practical to use for us visually impaired. After all, the idea of
> lines of code not longer than 80 characters because of braille displays
> has become rather well known so why not do something similar about the
> use of unicode characters in programming or so?

I'd advise against this. To the contrary, unicode usage should be 
encouraged as much as possible.

Those unicode characters are at last a universal standard way to 
communicate which also includes emojis etc. The alternative to emojis 
and special characters is embedded images which are not standardized at 
all, and worse are completely inaccessible.

We might have alignment issues with unicode description and such, but 
that's something for brltty and similar tools to solve. Working 
around this issue by asking other 
people not to use unicode is not a good solution.

Wrt brltty: it might be possible to quickly toggle between two modes, 
just like 6/8-dot braille, where one of these modes has unicode chars 
occupy their expected width using some replacement character 
representation (e.g. \alpha could be an a with dot 8 blinking or the 
like) and another mode where such character are spelled out using their 
unicode description. This way you get both the presentation alignment 
and the description but just not simultaneously.


Nicolas