Re: [orca-list] contracted braille

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi Josh:

Getting contracted braille support going would be great.

> Could you all sumarize for me what your problems have been so far so
> that I don't have to re-invent the wheel or bang my 
> head against the same walls? <grin>  My idea basically is to allow the
> user to access the preferences menu on the 
> braille display, and toggle contracted braille, cursor
> style/presentation from there instead of trying to make orca do 
> it.  It makes sense to me to let brltty do all the grunt work so that
> orca can fulfill its goal of blending seemlessly 
> with other assistive technologies.  As of now, pressing the key
> combination for the preferences menu lets me have that 
> menu for a few seconds, then I am returned to whatever the current app
> happens to be.

The main problems we've been facing is a good way to:

1) Give something text and have it turn it into the right cells

2) Find out how many cells a given string turns into (to help us with
panning)

3) Turning a cell position back into a character offset into the string
(to help us with doing the right thing with cursor routing keys)

We also want to make sure there are good braille contraction tables for
multiple locales.  The general opinion that seems to be forming is that
something other than BrlTTY should own this -- BrlTTY/BrlAPI want to
operate on a lower level.  

There's something called gnome-braille that has been languishing for a
while.  I took a look at the API a couple years back, and I think we
might be able to strip some goodness out of it.  Making it viable and
real, however, will probably take some work.  We just don't have many
resources to work on it.  Maybe this is something you'd might like to
explore?

> I would like to have orca simply  
> do nothing when it sees the brlprefmenu command.  Have you all tried
> this?

With BrlTTY v3.8dev, we did some work to tell Orca to consume only the
BrlTTY keys it was interested in.  This means that the brlprefmenu
should hopefully be accessible while Orca is running (I remember testing
that, I think).  Which version of BrlTTY are you using?

Will