why Your development team disabled automatic braille display detection and support during booting from A Ubuntu live CD?

[Luke Yelavich]

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On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 10:26:30PM EST, Mgr. Janusz Chmiel wrote:
> Good afternoon,
> 
>     I Am very sad and unhappy, that Your accessibility development team considered to remove automatic braille display autodetection and support during booting from A live CD. I found out, that Your development team probably made this decision while officially publishing Ubuntu Hardy Heron Live and later even official CD. I would like to please You, if You could give Me atleast a short programmers explanation, why did You have to make this change to ubuntu distribution. I very liked automatic braille display detection algorithms and I have never problems, that Brltty displayed message during booting up, that screen is not in A text mode. Because after starting Gnome, I could start Orca Screen Reader and I could enable braille support.

Dispaly auto-detection is only possible for USB Braille displays, and even then, one of these displays had to be disabled for detection, due to it conflicting with other devices users used for serial devices, since the display and these serial devices used the same chip. Looking at the file that is responsible for the detection, /etc/udev/rules.d/85-brltty.rules, it appears that one of the HandyTech displays was the problem, which display it is exactly, I am not sure.

For serial/bluetooth displays, unfortunately at the moment manual configuration is required, since it is not easily possible to detect these displays. There is a mechanism in place to configure these displays when one chooses to use Braille from the live CD accessibility menu, however this is not yet speech enabled, something which I hope to address in the release of Ubuntu after intrepid.

If something else is broken, I would appreciate bug reports, and the steps you have taken to reproduce the problem. Unfortunately I do not have a USB Braille display, so cannot test and check detection myself.

I hope this clears things up, and please feel free to contact me should you have any further questions.

Luke
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