[Accessibility] Re: Localized braille (Was: Gnopernicus and ISO-Latin2 characters)

[Erkki Kolehmainen]

Dear All,

After having started this, I'd be interested to participate in a more 
specific discussion. Unfortunately I won't be back in my office from my 
business trips until the latter part of September. However, I'd be happy 
to join at that time whichever list of your choice; currently I'm on 
brltty at mielke.cc.

Regards, Erkki I. Kolehmainen

Samuel Thibault wrote:

> BTW,
> 
> Remus, I bounced you a proposition from Erkki Kolehmainen about having
> localized braille patterns included in the Unicode Common Locale Data
> Repository (CLDR [1]), because I'm not sure whether you are subscribed
> to brltty at mielke.cc or accessibility at a11y.org.
> 
> I've added quite a lot of Ccs. Sorry for such broadcasting, but I think
> the issue is important. Maybe a mailing list could be setup at a11y.org
> for people interested in the discussion.
> 
> Brass, brltty, gnopernicus, libbraille, suse blinux, etc. are all
> software that need to translate text into braille patterns. For now,
> each of them have their own (more or less complete) algorithms and
> tables for various encodings, languages and countries.
> 
> Erkki proposed to have at least those tables collected in CLDR. This
> seems quite nice since CLDR people are rather good at handling such
> data. I listened again to the record of the FSG meeting in Hawaii: this
> very issue was raised, but no solution had emerged. Erkki now proposes
> one.
> 
> But more than that, it would be useful to have a single library using
> these tables, that every software would be able to use. Because
> elaborating braille is _not_ an easy task at all :)
> 
> The experimental gnome-braille software from Bill is a bit similar
> to such library. In a few words (please correct me if I'm wrong), it
> is able to turn utf-8 text into braille dots and display them via
> libbraille or on braille mon. It takes into account the limited width of
> the actual display, and lets the application control how it is scrolled.
> 
> Maybe this is a good start, I don't know. Libbraille already uses it in
> his experimental unicode translator.
> 
> There are of course issues. And they need to be discussed, because else
> people will probably not use gnome-braille or whatever library that
> could get developped, and they will eventually rather develop their own
> algorithms, which is just duplicated work.
> 
> Some examples of issues that I personally see are that it uses
> libgobject and libglib, while screen readers tend to be as small as
> possible, for embedded devices or installation images ; the features
> that gnome-braille proposes also seem a bit mixed: it proposes braille
> translation, display width management and braille output, all in one,
> while I would have rather seen 3 separate libraries.
> 
> I guess that for instance Brass/brltty/suse blinux would rather be
> interested in a very simple library, with no libgobject/libglib
> dependency, which just provides localized braille translation (actually,
> roughly what gnome-braille's braille-encoder.h and braille-table*.h
> declares). It could be seen as a braille equivalent to the mb*towc*(),
> iconv(), setlocale() etc. functions, so I'm not sure whether this should
> remain in the gnome project. Erkki, maybe you would have more precise
> opinion on this?
> 
> Gnopernicus could then be interested in a complementary library that
> takes care of screen width and scrolling.
> 
> And eventually, for applications (or even gnopernicus, I don't know),
> facilities to connect that to actual output (braille monitor / BrlAPI /
> libbraille) could be useful indeed.
> 
> Well, that was just to give a first opinion. This really needs discussed
> somehow. Probably not using all those mailing lists but some new list,
> though.
> 
> Regards,
> Samuel
> [1] http://www.unicode.org/cldr
>