Sunday September 18, 2005

BRLTTY version 3.7 now available

Dave Milke, the maintainer of BRLTTY, has just announced release 3.7. For those not in the know, BRLTTY is an extremely powerful and flexible open source UNIX screen reader (in addition to running on GNU/Linux systems, BRLTTY has been available for Solaris, on the Solaris Companion CD in fact, for some time now). It supports a long list of Braille displays as well as a number of software and hardware speech synthesizers. The change log for version 3.7 is long, and list a huge host of improvements.

Cherry-picking just a few of the changes to report here:

• Provides initial support for GNU/Hurd, Mac OS X, Cygwin, and MinGW
• Provides initial support for AT-SPI, allowing BrlTTY to start being used with accessible terminal sessions in a graphical desktop
• BrlAPI has now been bumped to version 0.4.0. BrlAPI is how other applications (like Gnopernicus) can leverage BRLTTY's great Braille display support for their own interface
• And appropos of BrlAPI, this release contains a number of improvements specifically in the interoperability with Gnopernicus. See the BRLTTY document on Gnopernicus interoperability for details.