[Kde-accessibility] Annoucing libbraille

[Sébastien Sablé]

Hi,

Bill Haneman wrote:

> 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.

That looks great! Indeed libbraille is mostly concerned with hardware 
driver at this time, and is limited as far as encoding and translation 
is concerned. So it seems like a great combination.

Unicode support and more Braille tables was rather high in my TODO list, 
but if a separate library can handle that (and certainly better than I 
could) I certainly would use it.

Indeed some people contacted me, and they plan to use libbraille with 
Arabic Braille (http://siragi.sourceforge.net/); I bet they will be 
really happy if something like gnome-braille can handle the conversion 
in this language.

> 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 completely agree with that. I never intended to include things like 
abbreviated Braille or Japanese Braille in libbraille, which are complex 
enough to deserve a project on their own.

Indeed I have a colleague who works on a project of software for kids at 
school and he uses 6 dots Braille. Since his platform is based on 
mozilla, he does the conversion in JavaScript and uses libbraille just 
to display some dots.

Another colleague works on a java conversion tool between 
MathML/LaTeX/local Braille maths (there is a web demo at this url: 
http://inova.snv.jussieu.fr/maths/) and he also provides directly a 
representation in dots, which libbraille displays directly without 
conversion.

For those 2 examples, I had to provide a way to directly render Braille 
dots:
http://libbraille.org/tutorial/node6.html
(it currently works one character at a time, but I could change it so 
that a whole line could be sent directly)

gnome-braille could work a lot the same with libbraille. It would 
provide a layer handling conversion/encoding and providing the dot 
representation to libbraille which would display it directly on the 
Braille display.

> 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.

I will be on holidays tomorrow until the forum in Stuggart. But right 
after that I will look more into details how gnome-braille works.

Best regards

-- 
Sébastien Sablé