Grub & accessibility

[Samuel Thibault]

Hello,

(Cc-ing the grub-devel mailing list for the record)

Just a few short points:

- brltty GPL2+ and has a _lot_ of drivers for braille devices, it would
  be sad to not reuse them :)
- speakup is also GPL2+ and has drivers for hardware speech syntheses.
- qemu can emulate a Baum braille device through the -usbserial braille
  or -serial braille options.  The output needs to be done through
  brltty, thanks to its virtual braille device for instance.  I had
  written some howto on http://brl.thefreecat.org/text-apps-a11y-test.html
- I had already developed something to make grub accessible through
  braille devices, in GRUB1, as a prototype, I've attached it. I've
  never had the time to develop it more.

How I see things working concerning braille: you can have a look at my
prototype to see how I had done it, and probably more importantly, what
the interface with device drivers would look like: braille.h only has
braille_init() to initialize the serial port and braille_write() to
output text. One missing thing is a function that tells how large the
braille device is (usually it's 40 cells).

A simple way to proceed easily from the core grub part would be to write
a prototype that just outputs text on the serial port as is, so that you
just need to use -serial stdio for instance.  Glueing brltty drivers to
it could then be done independently, I can handle that as I know them
quite well.

Concerning screen reading, the way that is usually used is that normal
PC keyboard actions work as usual, the regular screen output works as
usual, and the braille device and speech output the text corresponding
to the current action (e.g. the currently selected menu entry).  That
should already be a good thing. One thing to remember is that it's
important to keep the regular output so that blind users can be easily
helped by sighted people.

Then there can be a more complete screen reader, by using keypresses
from the braille device or PC keyboard shortcuts, that permits to browse
around the screen.

Samuel

patch-grub-braille.diff
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