Re: Grub & accessibility

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 03:50:23PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> (Cc-ing the grub-devel mailing list for the record)
> 
> Just a few short points:
> 
> - brltty GPL2+ and has a _lot_ of drivers for braille devices, it would
>   be sad to not reuse them :)
> - speakup is also GPL2+ and has drivers for hardware speech syntheses.
> - qemu can emulate a Baum braille device through the -usbserial braille
>   or -serial braille options.  The output needs to be done through
>   brltty, thanks to its virtual braille device for instance.  I had
>   written some howto on http://brl.thefreecat.org/text-apps-a11y-test.html
> - I had already developed something to make grub accessible through
>   braille devices, in GRUB1, as a prototype, I've attached it. I've
>   never had the time to develop it more.

Hi Samuel,

We've made some exceptions, but in general, we'd like to keep the GRUB
codebase made entirely of FSF-copyrighted code, or at least code we
have disclaimers for.

OTOH, we don't want to discard valuable work that wasn't written specifically
for GRUB.  Perhaps Marco or Okuji will allow an exception for this case.

Another possibility is integrating those drivers in the grub-extras
repository.  grub-extras is a collection of 3rd party add-ons for GRUB.
It's not officially part of GRUB, but distributions (e.g. debian) can
integrate it into their builds.

About your patch:

> diff -urN grub-debian-patched/configure.ac grub-0.95+cvs20040624/configure.ac
> --- grub-debian-patched/configure.ac	2005-09-05 03:57:02.000000000 +0200
> +++ grub-0.95+cvs20040624/configure.ac	2005-09-05 03:56:54.000000000 +0200

Only GRUB 2 is in development.  New features won't be added to GRUB Legacy
anymore.

> +static unsigned char latin1_2_dots_vs[256] = {
> +0X00, 0X81, 0X83, 0X89, 0X99, 0X91, 0X8B, 0X9B,
> +[...]

This needs some clarification.  Opaque blobs are not acceptable, but arrays
whose content is documented/understandable should be ok.

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."