Braille support for Debian
Hi all,
In the next couple of weeks, I'm hoping to make the official 1.0 release
of BRLTTY, , a user-level `driver' for `soft Braille displays'; these
displays can show about half of a single line at a time in Braille, so by
moving this little `window' around the screen, a blind user gains access
to a text-based console (this is in fact what I'm using right now).
I'm interested in packaging it for Debian, but a couple of questions arise.
1. sysvinit interface. On a computer administrated by a blind user, it
is essential that the Braille display starts during boot-up, BEFORE the
filesystems are checked; if the checks failed and the system went down
into single-user mode, the Braille must still work. :-) I've solved this
on my system by inserting the lines
if [ -x /sbin/brltty ]
then
/sbin/brltty
fi
after update (bdflush) is started and before fsck ... can this sort of
thing be done automatically? It's also possible to start it directly from
inittab ...
2. Boot/root disks. It would be extremely handy for a lot of people if
Braille support could be built in to a root-disk. I've done this for my
system, but that's a bit untidy (I'm no expert on designing rootdisks).
Disk requirements are: executable in /sbin, sizes 20484 (a.out) or 18525
(elf); script in /sbin, size < 1k; directory /etc/brltty containing about
12k of data/help files.
Unfortunately, there are about four versions of BRLTTY, differentiated at
compile-time, for different makes of soft Braille display which are
incompatible. :-(
Can someone help out here? Bruce, is this your area?
Cheers,
Nikhil.
P.S. Maybe I'll get round to putting this in the kernel one day ... :-)
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