Hi. I've seriously started to use Orca with a Modular Evolution 88. Currently, the "status cells" (the display is contiguous, i.e. there is no break between the 80 cells and the remaining 8 cells) can not be used by Orca. This is 1. slightly confusing since the BRLTTY status cell info is still shown while Orca (or some other screen reader) is using the display. 2. Wasteful. Especially in graphical environments, the screen width is no longer a fixed number. To waste 8 cells is really a loss for the user. Actually, considering the price of this device, not to use 8 cells means to waste 1400 EUR.
I am aware that the status cell issue is a problem in general from the API POV. However, I still want to propose a solution for contiguous display models: Drivers which support contiguous displays like the Evolution (or the Satellite 70 for instance) would set a contiguous type variable in the BrailleDsiplay structure upon brl_open(). The value of that variable could be something like: typedef enum { NOT_CONTIGUOUS = 0, STATUS_CELLS_LEFT, STATUS_CELLS_RIGHT } ContiguousCells; If an API client requests brlapi_displaySize for a display with a non-zero contiguous setting, the api_server adds up the textCell and statusCell count and reports them all together to the client. When a write request is received, the API server distributes the write onto the text and status cells of the contiguous display according to the contiguous setting (write to status cells first or last). Rationale: Providing full status cell support to API clients is difficult because the layout of separate status cells on various models is very different from each other. Therefore it is not really easy to generalize for API clients without having to put alot of detail into such an API. However, contiguous displays represent an exception as they actually don't have any real status cells. BRLTTY just claims (for the benefit of a fixed-screen width console) that the display has separate status cells. I propose that BrlAPI should overwrite that internal decision when exporting information about contiguous displays to API clients. Problems: Currently, drivers map directly statuscell routing key presses to some global commands like HELP. For full compatibility, we'd need to pass a command like CMD_ROUTESTATUS to the core so that api_server can correctly remap routing key presses for contiguous displays. This change should not involve an API changes since it would only affect internal behaviour of api_server.c. I have a hope that if we agree on this, that we can do it before 3.8. -- CYa, Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/> .''`. | Get my public key via finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] : :' : | 1024D/7FC1A0854909BCCDBE6C102DDFFC022A6B113E44 `. `' `- <URL:http://delysid.org/> <URL:http://www.staff.tugraz.at/mlang/> _______________________________________________ This message was sent via the BRLTTY mailing list. To post a message, send an e-mail to: BRLTTY@mielke.cc For general information, go to: http://mielke.cc/mailman/listinfo/brltty