This page collects several projects, resources and links on free software accessibility.
Available in BRLTTY, BrlAPI is a way for your applications or screen readers to easily output braille without having to tackle all the nasty technical details, through the use of a library which forwards the braille output to the BRLTTY daemon. See the documentation of latest stable version and the reference manual
.NEW: in the new release (0.5.0), BrlAPI has Python, Java, Tcl, OCaml and CLisp bindings!
BrlAPI is already used by leading screen readers like Gnopernicus, Orca, LSR, and soon Serotek's System Access and probably NVDA.
Several programs were written for transferring files to/from braille devices:
There are two generic guides: one for developers, and one for users. They are a bit outdated, but they still give a good idea of the needs.
Gnome has its own pair of guides: one for developers, and one for users. There is also a good LinuxJournal article.
For GULs, there is a page from the wiki.
For making an Linux installer accessible, there is a page from the wiki.
A guide for testing accessibility of text applications
Slides of a presentation given by Samuel at FOSDEM 2008 called "How accessible is Debian", which presents to Debian developpers both accessibility in general, and in Debian in particular, and how that could be improved. There is also an html version, the video the audio and the text
Slides of a presentation done at the Villette, general introduction to accessibility (in French)
Slides of a presentation for a round table, software accessibility: alternative solutions for visually-impaired people (in French), HTML version.
So as to check how good your graphical application looks like, you can try Accerciser.
Since debian's official daily-built images now include brltty, we don't provide mini.iso ourselves anymore. Please download from here. See the official Debian wiki page and our own wiki for more details.
A set of fonts/keyboard mappings for typing braille on the linux (>= 2.6.17rc1) console with regular keyboard.
French computer braille is getting unified. A test version is available for BRLTTY. It is recommended to get explanations from AVH.
You can find here some braille tables which don't seem to be supported by nowadays' screen readers.
You can get Windows and DOS version of brltty here.
Braille devices are expensive and non free, please join us on the Free Braille Display project.
Any question/comment/anything? Just Mail