[Kde-accessibility] Annoucing libbraille

[Bill Haneman]

Hi Sêbastien:

Thanks a lot for your work in this area.  I'll be looking more closely 
at libbraille in the near future, I hope.

I hope you can look at gnome-braille (in gnome CVS) to try and avoid 
duplication of effort.  gnome-braille is mostly concerned with encoding 
and translation, and the rather tricky business of international 
braille, and not very much with hardware drivers, at the moment.

I agree that it makes little sense to have multiple braille APIs that 
appear to duplicate things.  Note also that a "fake" braille display 
already exists (though it may not do as much as yours, yet), as part of 
the gnopernicus project, and if you build+install gnopernicus you can 
run the virtual braille display standalone ("brlmonitor").

I really think we should separate the issues of encoding/translation 
from the issues of drivers for different hardware devices.  I understand 
the desirability of using dot-conversions that are either part of 
existing drivers or built into braille displays, and gnome-braille's 
translation APIs allow this on a mix-and-match basis.  That is, braille 
translations can be cascaded both to handle mixed language situations 
and to support multi-stage translation (which is required by things like 
Japanese braille and also a good way of handling "Grade2" braille, true 
6-dot brailles, and the like.

I put this in GNOME cvs as a matter of convenience, but think 
gnome-braille would be at home in freedesktop.org, it makes sense to 
make such things common.  I look forward to discussing how to integrate 
gnome-braille and libbrl effectively.

best regards,

Bill