Making a BSD system more braille friendly

[Enrico Mioso <mrkiko.rs%gmail.com@localhost>]

Hello to all of you reading this message.

Sorry for my possibly ugly message: english isn't my native language.
My name is Enrico: and I am a blind computer user. I currently am using Linux, 
with the help of a software called BRLTTY (of which NetBSD has a port): so I 
can read what's on the screen via a device called Braille Display. There are 
different vendors of such devices, and each one uses it's protocol in general. Different models may need different protocols, too.
This is probably especially true for USB-based devices, but I own also a serial 
(RS232) device which still uses it's own protocol. So BRLTTY works by reading the 
content of the console somehow, and sending informations to the braille display 
device, using the appropriate protocol. The braille display can request some actions to be performed to the 
BRLTTY software itself, via keypresses or other means.
I came to know BSD systems some time ago: and apreciated some of their qualities and overall stability. And 
wanted to make it more feasible for a blind user to administer a system, or 
try using an *BSD installation to perform it's daily tasks. The problem, as 
you'll know, is that in a *BSD kernel, there is no such interface allowing an user-space process to inspect the content of the 
console. On Linux systems, this is feabible via the /dev/vcs* 
interface (VCS(4)), which is infact used by BRLTTY. On BSD, the used 
approach was to patch an user-space application, namely GNU screen, to be able to access 
it's memory. Still I wanted something more integrated on the system, allowing 
me for example, to read the login prompt, and be able to control the system 
more completely. For this  I tried to look around to understand how wscons 
works, thinking that hooking up in wsdisplay would be interesting. Still, also 
because I have no experience on *BSD kernel hacking, I wasn't able to grasp the 
idea on how it works. So I was asking for your help and guidance on this effort. I can not 
guarantee how things go, but i would like to try. I experienced with an OpenBSD instance 
until now in QEMU/KVM. I was able to rebuild the kernel, so i think I will be able to prepare what's needed to experiment.
Thank you all very much for the time you spent reading this message.
Thank you for all, and have an happy new year.
Enrico