Hi,
Great to have so fast a reply :)
Stefan Reinauer, le Mon 03 Jul 2006 01:11:05 +0200, a écrit :
- Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org [060703 00:06]:
BIOSes is an area where accessibility is approximately non-existent. Asking vendors to support hardware speech syntheses and braille devices is quite dreamwork. I tried to convince accessibility people to release basic drivers with BSD licenses so that vendors might integrate them, but they just refused that, arguing that vendors will not make any effort to integrate them, and there will always be bugs
Maybe this code could be encapsulated, similar to how VGA bios or network boot is handled.
Indeed, except that it relies on serial or USB support, which might not be easy to ship in a so encapsulated way.
On the other hand, this would cut off quite some of the bringup from "visibility"
I'm sorry, my poor english couldn't understand that :)
LinuxBios, however, can be a great opportunity to have an accessible BIOS.
So what can be done? If I understood well, LinuxBios is a linux kernel -based bios. Does that mean that it has the notion of process, or does it run only in kernel mode? (which is sufficient for taking advantage of linux drivers).
LinuxBIOS initializes the machine just far enough so that it can run a Linux kernel from flash memory, hence the name. This in-flash Linux can run normal userspace programs as well as load another kernel from a hard disk or any other supported medium.
Oh, great. That means that we can run the usual screen reader called brltty, or any other such reader.
usually we can say: the main information exchange with LinuxBIOS (before the kernel is started) is not via VGA but via serial, which i believe is in theory usable with a braille terminal connected to another machine. (Is this correct?)
Yes. Minicom is quite accessible, so that's fine.
The interaction part is all happening while Linux is loaded (ie. from flash) so we could use a local braille terminal at this point by using all the Linux utilities.
Yup.
One question is: how big is the Linux code to support one/some/many/all braille terminals and can we fit this in a 512kB/1MB flash part. The answer mostly depends on your needs.
Devices usually depend on serial or USB support, plus the /dev/vcsa interface for reading the console's content.
Samuel