Re: Gnome and support for the visually impaired

[Dave Mielke <dave mielke cc>]

[quoted lines by Peter Korn on 2005/09/30 at 10:58 -0700]

>But for 
>deaf-blind, or for people who otherwise want an audio-free environment, do 
>you think some sort of dot-pattern keyboard status indicator on the Braille 
>display would be useful? Though I've heard it is going out of style, many 
> Braille displays dedicated several cells a the far right edge for status 
>indication.  We already have a GNOME Keyboard Accessibility status applet 
>GUI.  Would a Braille equivalent of that be interesting?

Yes, I think that'd be a good idea. All it'd take is one reserved cell wehrein
each of the 8 dots could represent some useful boolean status indicator. Such a
braille indication, or the continuous tone scheme offered by locktones, both
offer an adequate replacement for the keyboard LEDs (which, I'm sure, sighted
people wouldn't want to be without).

Another thing I'd personally like to see in that kind of braille indicator
would be the number of the currently selected Gnopernicus keypad layer. It's
very easy for a user to forget which layer he switched to (before, for example,
he took a phone call or got into an interesting conversation with one of his
children). For sighted users this could obviiously be displayed on the screen. 
I'm not sure what a good speech solution for it would be (I just use braille)
other than, perhaps, to have a standard key combination which works in all
layers cause the selected keypad layer number to be spoken.

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