[Kde-accessibility] Annoucing libbraille
Sébastien Sablé
sable at users.sourceforge.net
Tue Aug 10 23:28:52 CEST 2004
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
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