Please excuse my ignorance. It seems to me that we don't have a native Linux touch interface that is accessible, or did I totally miss something?
Having Braille on touch screen input is a nice to have. We need a way to navigate a touch based GUI first, unless I've missed something. --FC > On Apr 3, 2022, at 5:55 PM, Rich Morin <r...@cfcl.com> wrote: > > Thanks to Samuel and Devin for their input. As Devin said: > >> Smart phones use touchscreen braille input to make typing faster. ... >> This attempts to bring this to Linux smart phones and such like that. > > This is precisely my goal. I'd like to provide touchscreen braille input for > Linux smart phones. I'm particularly interested in supporting postmarketOS > (pmOS), because it targets older (and thus more economical) phones. However, > I'd hope that my code would work on any Linux (or for that matter, BSD) > variant. > > Since I have NO interest in trying to create a screen reader, I need to > understand the existing packages and what I'd need to do in order to support > them. Please feel free to correct and/or supplement these notes... > > # BRLTTY > >> BRLTTY is a background process (daemon) which provides access to the >> Linux/Unix console (when in text mode) for a blind person using a >> refreshable braille display. It drives the braille display, and provides >> complete screen review functionality. Some speech capability has also been >> incorporated. -- https://brltty.app/ > > > This seems pretty promising, but I have no clue how I should send event > messages to BRLTTY. I sent a note to their mailing list, but other advice > and suggestions would be very welcome. > > # Orca > > Orca appears to support Braille input and output. I read that: > > - "The Orca screen reader can display the user interface on a refreshable > Braille display." > - "Orca supports contracted braille via the liblouis project." > > So, it would seem reasonable to take advantage of Orca's Braille input > capabilities. I gather that Orca prefers to use the AT-SPI protocol on > D-Bus. As Samuel pointed out, I could support this via > atspi_generate_keyboard_event. > > # Yasr > > I read that "Yasr is a general-purpose console screen reader for GNU/Linux > and other Unix-like operating systems." I suspect that I'd want to talk to > it via uinput, but perhaps Samuel can clarify and/or correct this. > > -r >
