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Our Blogs Open Sauce Lead, kindly light: Debian shows the way
Our Blogs Open Sauce Lead, kindly light: Debian shows the way | Lead, kindly light: Debian shows the way |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Saturday, 02 February 2008 | |
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White, who is blind, presented a paper on using Linux with speech and Braille output interfaces. A GNU/Linux user since 1998, when he switched over from DOS, White's paper provided a comprehensive overview of how much support the blind and sight-impaired people are afforded by free software projects. Given that his entire audience consisted of sighted people, White first provided a rundown of Braille - and also the way it differs from language to language - and the methods by which it is implemented in hardware and software. The piezo-electric cell technology behind the refreshable braille display that he uses makes the device prohibitively expensive; he said it cost him something in the region of $8500. However, he said, this was the only real option for people like him when it came to using computers. Everything else was still in the prototype stage. The Braille access daemon, BRLTTY, a client/server based infrastructure for applications that use a Braille display, provides the needed drivers to communicate with the hardware. White's move from DOS to GNU/Linux was aided by the maintainer of BRLTTY, Dave Mielke, who worked with him to extend a driver so that it could support the Braille display device that White uses. |
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