Re: [g-a-devel] Gnome accessibility projects list

[Aaron Leventhal <aaron moonset net>]

What would be useful is to have excellent Braille translation and format 
come out when you print something.

For the high quality translation and format to happen automatically, 
you'd have to have something come through CUPS other than raw text. It 
would need to be a structured document of some kind.

Yes, the translation, formatting and editing could happen in OOo first 
and then send the BRF to CUPS. However, what if you want to emboss high 
quality Braille From a web page in Firefox? I guess it would need 
something it could send an HTML page to and get the BRF back, before 
sending it to CUPS.

Anyway, we'd need to think of how the architecture should work for the 
big picture. We have a big opportunity to much better integration of 
Braille technologies in FOSS than we have on proprietary platforms. I 
dreamed about this for years when I worked on MegaDots.

- Aaron



Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Dorado Martínez, Francisco Javier, le Thu 26 Oct 2006 14:03:32 +0200, a écrit :
>   
> > In the users' needs another requirement I think should be to give support to braille embosers (braille printing support) into desktop
> >     
>
> Actually, it should mostly find its way to cups, since that's _the_ Unix
> printing service.  The idea would be to just have to call
>
> lp foo.brf
>
> or even
>
> lp foo.txt
>
> and they are printed :)
>
>   
> > and to add braille transcription into OpenOffice.
> >     
>
> This is quite another issue.  I can see two points here:
>
> - "ink" braille: OpenOffice.org (OOo) just needs a braille font for
> 0x28xy unicode values (the braille glyphs), and then it will be able
> to print braille patterns.  Of course, this is not what you want, but
> that's probably what OOo people think about first.  Remember, they
> probably don't even know what an embosser is.  Anyway, this is still
> easy and might be useful :)
> - embossed braille: here, OOo would have to send raw text or braille
> to the embosser.  The easiest way would of course be to use File->Save
> As and choose the .txt format, which one can then submit to lp.  Now,
> what you are probably talking about is an embedded braille transcription
> module into OOo.  This should be feasible, by using gnome-braille or
> liblouis for instance.  This would need a bunch of communication between
> braille people and OOo people, for determining how well this can be
> included in OOo: from an odt document, produce a braille-ready format,
> _be able to read it_, and then submit it to cups, which knows how
> embossers work.
>
> In short, I can see several steps:
> - have cups work with embossers.
> - have OOo people include a braille font in standard
> - integrate a braille transcription module.
>
> Samuel
>
>