Hi Shaul and all, I see that this subject caused more interest than I expected, so in my previous mail I tried to be the shortest possible. But since I'm asked various questions on and off list, I'll try to provide more details. 1. A braile display is an electronic device that takes it's information from the screen's buffer. As Tzafrir already mentioned, it gives information of a single line, but it also has various buttons and function keys to provide ways to reach in the most quickliest manner any information you need. Most of the older braile display (including my current one) is connected to the computer via com port. Currently, more and more displays (including my future one, which I hope to get within some months) are connected via Usb and there even are some brand new that offer bluetooth connectivity. 2. Those displays need software "drivers" for various operating systems. Besides driving the display, they also provide even better functionality within ghe specific operating system including colors and graphics to some extent. For example, such software exists for the Microsoft Windows environment. The most popular one and the one I use is called Jaws For Windows and you can find details on it and the way it works at: http://www.freedomscientific.com. 3. Concerning Linux: there are 2 options, one being a text only mode and the other, X-Windows. For the text mode, there is an open source driver supporting nerly all the existing braile displays and it's called brltty. you may find details at: http://mielke.cc/brltty. 4. The X-Windows environment is the more problematic one. Up to now, I did not hear of any official announcement for any accessibility success for the KDE interface, althoug I know that in Sun Microsystems there is a team working on this issue. Concerning Gnome, there is an accessibility software called Gnopernicus. For details go to: http://www.baum.ro. However, I did not have feedback about how good it is and to which extent it gives accessability. 5. Concerning installation of Linux on my home computer: I would like that the installation will give me both text-only login and X-windows login (probably gnome). The X-windows option is to try the Gnopernicus by myself and even try to improve it, the best I can. In my previous mail, I gave a somewhat incorrect information. The brltty works for all the linux distributions and is even included in the most of the installers so, theoretically you can recieve braile output during installation process. However, and probably this happens with most installers and most displays, when hardware probing is made during installation, this causes the freezing of the braile display in the middle of the installation, which means for me, loosing the output. I would not want to take the risk of remaining with a stuck installation and for this reason I asked for asighted help. As I said, it does not realy matter which distribution I install. However, I know from where to download the specific "brailified installer" of Fedora Core 3. and a second advantage of it is that Fedora Core 3, if I understand correctly, includes Gnome which, in turn, includes Gnopernicus, which I mentioned above. For this reason, I slightly would preffer this distribution, although those additions may easily be installed on a Debian or Knopix distribution. (by the way, there is a distribution derived from Knopix called Oralux and this one has the braile output during installation). Well, this is for now and sorry for the lengthy, but hopefully interesting message. Rafi.
> -----Original Message----- > From: Shaul Karl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Sunday, December 26, 2004 1:04 AM > To: Rafi Cohen > Cc: linux-il@linux.org.il > Subject: Re: this may sound somewhat off-topic, but please read > > > On Sat, Dec 25, 2004 at 10:02:29PM +0200, Rafi Cohen wrote: > > I'm using a braile display to interact with the computers. > > > What is a braille display? I mean, how it looks, how the user > interacts with it, how does it cope with something other then letters? > How does it refreshes the display? What about colors? > I didn't google for that information. Perhaps you can provide some > good links about such displays. > In particular, can't such a display automatically represent ASCII > characters, without the need for a special driver? > ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
