Monday 23 May 2016

How would be the browser extensions


Hi All,

       Yes the community bonding period is over and coding period started. Me and my mentor really happy to announce that with this community bonding period we just made the basic chrome and firefox extensions that can show how it's going to be!! Once again thanks to my mentor and varnam project. The code is hosted on github with the name braille-browser-addons.

Repository URL : https://github.com/anwar3746/braille-browser-addons

To test it in firefox do the following steps
1 - git clone https://github.com/anwar3746/braille-browser-addons.git
2 - cd braille-browser-addons/firefox/
3 - jpm run -b /usr/bin/firefox
4 - Go to google.com and right click on text entry,from the context menu select Enable from braille sub menu.
5 - Try typing l(fds), k(fs), a(f), b(fd), c(fj)

To test it in chrome
1 - git clone https://github.com/anwar3746/braille-browser-addons.git
2 - Open chrome browser
3 - Go to settings and select extensions
4 - Check Developer mode
5 - Click Load unpacked extensions
6 - Choose chrome folder from braille-browser-addons
7 - Go to google.com and right click on text entry,from the context menu select Enable from braille sub menu.
8 - Try typing l(fds), k(fs), a(f), b(fd), c(fj)

References 
  1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tutorials/Getting_Started_(jpm)
  2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Tools/jpm
  3. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Guides/Content_Scripts 
  4. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/SDK/Guides/Content_Scripts/port 
  5. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted 
  6. ibus-sharada-braille.blogspot.com/
  7. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventTarget/addEventListener

An article that I read from OpenSourceForU May 2016
Courtesy  : CHMK Library, University Of Calicut







Thank You,
Anwar

Saturday 14 May 2016

The initial work


Hi All,
             
It is really good for me to engaged with free software activities which are interesting for me. I felt great to learn new aspects of life. Also as a new one to SMC and Indic project I get a lot's of new experiences such Instant Relay Chat (#smc-project).



As I mentioned earlier my first target is to create the web interface. As the first and easy step I tried to create a webpage that shows a textarea and user can type in braille way. Since I have no previous experience and lot of things to do immediately I asked my mentor for a hint and he said it can be done with a javascript and learn more about Apache2 webserver. After learning the working strategy of IBus-Braille and some works I just implemented a basic mechanism for testing the possibility and it worked!!. The code is as follows.

<html>
<body>
   <textarea id="brailletextarea" cols=60 rows=30 type="textarea" onKeyPress="KeyPress(event)" onKeyUp="KeyRelease(event)"> </textarea>
</body>
<script>
    var items = "";
    function KeyPress(event)
    {
items=items+String.fromCharCode(event.keyCode)
event.preventDefault();
    }
    function case_insensitive_comp(strA, strB) 
    {
  return strA.toLowerCase().localeCompare(strB.toLowerCase());
    }

    function KeyRelease(event)
    {
brailletextarea = document.getElementById('brailletextarea');
if(items != ""){
items = items.split("");
items = items.sort( case_insensitive_comp )
items = items.join("");
console.log(items);

if(items == "f"){
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+"a";
}
if(items == "df"){
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+"b";
}
if(items == "fs"){
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+"k";
}
if(items == "dfs"){
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+"l";
}
if(items == "fj"){
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+"c";
}
if(items == " ")
{
brailletextarea.value = brailletextarea.value+" ";
}
}
items="";
event.preventDefault();
    }
</script>
</html> 


Then I where searching over the internet for how extensions are created. On that time mentor Nalin gave me a good hint(https://github.com/varnamproject/varnam-browser-addons) which is varnam project(https://www.varnamproject.com/). Varnam is a cross platform opensource transliterator for Indian languages which have browser extentions hosted on github. I cloned the codebase of varnam-browser-addon and read it and I understand that it's the best place start the project. Also later I realize that varnam project is also a part of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing(SMC) done by navaneeth.

Thursday 5 May 2016

My Observations on the Ibus Braille Project

Hi,

I am very happy about GSOC 2016 has accepted my proposal on IBus Braille Enhancemnet.   


I convey my thanks to the Indic Project Team for requesting a slot for my project proposal.
 

Here I am writing about the staus of the Ibus Braille Enhancement Project.
As the coding has officially not started. I also didn't started coding till today.
I am making the analysis and studying about the Ibus Sharada Braille project done by Mr. Nalin Sathyan. I am happy to say that he is mentoring me in this project along with Samuel Thibault. So I got 2 experts as mentors. I am thanking Indic team for giving me those potential mentors.


As of today

Communicating with the mentor Nalin Sathyan directly because he is in the   same university where I am from. He gave me so many suggestion regarding how the User Interface should look like and how the mapping of the keys should be done. He told me about how he implemented the Ibus Sharada Braille project.

Had lots of communication with Mr.Sathyan Master One of the Potential users of the Ibus Sharada Braille Project. He is a teacher in Kasargod Govt School for the Blind. He trains his students typing using the Ibus Braille Project. I got some opinions from so many students those who are using the project. they like the project a lot and felt simple to type the languages Malayalm and English using the Ibus Braille Keyborad.

Some people suggested me about they are not able to use this because they are from the Windows platform. I am now a little bit concerned about the Web User Interface one of the core component of my proposed project.


I am getting into the other segments of the project which I described in my Proposal. It may be spotted after getting it thoroughly.

Thank You
Anwar