Disabling graphical boot and starting applications early

[Daniel Dalton]

Hi,

I'm vision impaired, so I would like a text boot screen so that I can
read it with brltty in Braille, as brltty does not support reading of
graphical boot screens. (so if something goes wrong, I can fix it
myself)

To achieve this I tried to disable plymouth. After a bit of research
best solution was just to remove the plymouth* scripts from /etc/init.d
(I've backed them up of course). 
I also set grub to "quiet" opposed to the default quiet splash. 

So, now maybe I have a text boot, not sure. Is this the best way to
achieve a text boot in ubuntu? 
Also, I don't want to replace quiet splash in grub with "text", because
I still want a gui to boot up. 

So if this has worked the second problem:
How to start brltty as early as possible so it is actually useful. In
theory brltty can be started as soon as the root fs is mounted I guess,
(since the brltty binary is on the root fs). 
How can I start brltty as soon as the root fs is mounted? 
Or as soon as possible. On my old debian install for example, I was able
to review file system checks of the root file system with brltty during boot. 
I looked in /etc/rcS.d/ and saw no mention of brltty, but brltty does
come up just before lightdm. 
So I don't even know where abouts it is being started. 

In summary I need:
1. A text boot screen 
2. Brltty to start as early as possible. 

Thanks for any help, 
Dan