[d-i] RFC: eye-free installation
Hey.
I'm trying to figure the best way to integrate accessibility
support into debian-installer. The goal is to allow installation
with completely different display types then a normal monitor.
There are several different methodologies for disabled people to access
the screen content, for example speech output, or through
braille displays. So some of this should be applicable to both, but
I'm limiting my particular work at braille display support, because
this is what I use.
I know that some of my questions are simply answered by "hack rootskel",
but I'm particularly interested in soltuions which use a modular
approach (.udebs), so that it is easy to add others in the future.
What we do?
We need to run a specific program at the beginning of the installation,
before any essential information is displayed, so that this program
can provide access to that. brltty is a daemon, run in background, accessing
the console via /dev/vcsa, so this may be quite simple. Other programs
(like yasr) could do this like screen (start some kind of vt100 emulator).
Right now, if we use postinst, only some programs will work (ex. 1),
and there is the problem how to specify that this udebs postinst
should be executed first before all others (like main-menu).
Problems:
There are many different assistive technology devices around.
Autodetection is a real problem, and not really implemented. In cases
where it was tried, it was not reliable, and didn't work for all devices.
So we need some way to specific which type of hardware is used,
preferably without any kind of visual interaction.
Two things come to mind: We could ensure that boot-parameters
can always be specified, and maybe even produce a little beep at that
point. With proper documentation of the parameters,
one could enter them more or less blindly.
Another way could be through the cdebconf preconfig stuff which
is used to supply a mysql user/pwd for example. I've just looked
at that code a bit, but couldn't figure where this will actually be
saved on the installation medium. Perhaps we could allow this
to be edited easily. This would also make it quite easy to specify
which kind of device is used.
(in addition to type of hardware, we'll also want the device name
(/dev/ttyS0...))
udeb->deb transition?
This may be well known, but how are we supposed to handle
the situation that brltty-udeb could have debconf questions answered,
but when the install is complete, we actually would like to have the
normal brltty .deb installed, and the questions should be
transfered, and not asked again.
Or should we just not ask those at this stage?
The base install:
Is there any modular way to specify additional packages
for the first base install? Because after reboot, the accessibility
related drivers should already work. Otherwise you reboot into darkness.
OK, this is all I can think of for now. I happy about every
kind of feedback I can get.
--
Thanks,
Mario
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