Programming

Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors

A braille display traditionally is a personal, almost handfitted (estimated by price) device controlled by its screen reader software. Not the editor. This has some unfortunate implications:

• There is no (standardized) API to control your braille device directly. You could hand your screenreader filtered data, but that would be read as well. At best, you might be able to script your screen reader software to a varying degree of success. However:
  • Every aspect about this is extremely abysmal in every possible way, so it will likely require you to fork over some biiiiig amount of cash to one of the vendors to provide a brittle plugin. In particular if we are talking about JAWS. Think of extremely unstandardized COBOL dev with less stability and more price gauging involved.
  • As far as free readers are involved, only the proprietary and licensing aspect go away. Still, developing extensions is terrible in many ways. For example, for ORCA, I was able to find out that you can extend it somehow. Alledgedly. NVDA on the other hand has better documentation. That is to say, it has documentation. Now, you might recall that NVDA is written mostly in Python, and its devs rightly don't even pretend that one could develop stable software in Python, so APIs might change. However, I wasn't able to find a Filter function specific to braille output. That's likely because
• From my superficial experience, developers of screen readers think of braille displays mostly as an alternative to speech. It even took them quite a while to be smart about not displaying redundant, long lines of text.

So yes, you might be overestimating how easy that is, compared to telling some diva asswipe chucklefuck to use that formatter or work at McDolans.

Let’s agree that we aren’t going to affect this change in this comment thread, so which one is more “pragmatic” is beside the point.

What does matter is whether we decide to have an inclusive view on this issue, and are willing to make extremely minor modifications to our settings and workflows to be more accommodating for others.

I am encountering more and more cases where people behave in inexplicably selfish ways, and this just feels like another one. It’s low/no-cost to do, yet could yield benefits to others. Low cost/risk, high potential reward.

Starting with “we’re not going to even consider raising awareness and let the market decide” is just a very cynical way to approach the world, and I’d argue is even actively harmful to the people that hold that view.