Re: Annoucing libbraille

[Sébastien Sablé <sable users sourceforge net>]

Luke Yelavich wrote:

> Why did you not simply offer to help work on BrlTTY, as it already has a BrlAPI.
> Having 2 libraries for the accessibility systems of GNOME and KDE to support
> would not be easy. And since BrlTTY is already supported by GNOME, extending
> it's functionality would be a lot quicker to get the results you wanted.

When I started, BrlAPI did not exist and BRLTTY was really not modular
enough (IMHO) even if this has improved a lot since then. Also BrlAPI
needs the BRLTTY screen reader running as a daemon and communicates
through a network interface. I think it is easier to have Braille
drivers in an independant shared library with a common API.

Also porting BRLTTY to win32 would certainly not have been that simple,
and win32 was a requirement for the game platform for blind children I
was working on at that time.

I think the fact that there are 2 different projects is not a problem.
Both projects have their qualities and do not have exactly the same
priorities: BrlAPI/BRLTTY is mature but a bit complex while libbraille
is  more experimental but has original features (win32, autodetection,
other languages than C...).
You can test both and choose which one is the best for your task.

You should note however that I have good contacts on other mailing-lists
(french blinux) with some of the people working on BrlAPI and that we
are trying to see if some parts could be shared (like drivers API for
example) or integrated together so that we don't duplicate efforts.

Bye

--
Sébastien Sablé
http://libbraille.org