On Fri, May 05, 2017 at 02:12:28PM +0200, Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult wrote:
> Aren't these things that naturally belong into X or the input itself,

It would be nice if x itself implemented an accessibility framework,
but it currently doesn't as far as I know. If it did, people with
disabilities wouldn't be limited to gnome, which would be again nice.

> eg. speech input, braille display, etc ?

I'm not sure what you're getting at in the above example, can you please
elaborate? If you're saying that there should be a driver for a braille
display, speech input, or speech output just like there is for a mouse
for example, then this isn't that simple. With a mouse for example all
you have to do the way I understand it is to track the mouse movement,
move the mouse pointer on the screen by the same amount, and track if
buttons were clicked, and where the pointer was when the buttons were
clicked. In the case of a braille display, you can't simply send video
output to it, because it would make no sense. Doing so would be like
sending an audio file directly to the sound card. You instead need a
audio player to interpret the audio data, and play it to the sound
card. This is what brlTTY does for example. It not only drives the
braille display, but grabs video from the text console, formats it
into something the braille display can act on, and sends it to the
braille display. The orca screen reader does much the same thing with
graphical output, but uses brlTTY to drive the braille display,
instead of replicating that functionality itself.

The same is true for speech input, and speech output. Software
listening to input from the microphone needs to interpret the audio,
and execute the required action(s). You can't send video output
directly to the sound card, because that would make no sense. Software
has to grab the video output, interpret into text, send that text to a
text to speech engine, which then sends that audio to a sound card.

This is all quite over simplified, but I hope it makes sense.

Greg


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