Re: On Braille and Linux

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Hello,

Rich Morin, le mer. 30 mars 2022 21:29:48 -0700, a ecrit:
> AFAIK, there isn't any braille screen input support for Linux,

AIUI, you mean using a touch screen or touch pad to type Braille? I'm
not aware of anything like that.

> One major issue is that I'm not at all clear on how to deal with the output.  What back-end programs should I target and what interface(s) do they generally want to deal with from input devices?  For example, is there an easy way in Linux for a user mode process to emulate a keyboard device? 

There are various ways to do that. If your output is really keypresses
you can emulate a keyboard thanks to Linux' uinput. If your output is
rather text, you can use atspi's atspi_generate_keyboard_event. You can
also rather implement an ibus module.

> More generally, I'd like to get some feedback on a11y, system and user interfaces, etc.  For example:
> 
> - What back-end programs should I target?
> - What kinds of gestures would folks want?
> - What sorts of interfaces should I present?
> 
> Advice, caveats, clues, and pointers would all be welcome...

I'd say start with determining what the user needs are precisely, before
looking at the technical details.

Samuel