BRLTTY

BRLTTY is a background daemon that gives a blind user access to text consoles on Linux and similar systems via a refreshable braille display. It can drive the display from very early in the boot sequence, so the system is usable in single-user mode, during recovery, and for ordinary day-to-day work.

Version 6.9.1, April 2026 · Copyright © 1995-2026 The BRLTTY Developers · http://brltty.app/

About refreshable braille

A refreshable braille display is a piece of hardware containing a row of cells, each made up of small pins that can be raised or lowered to render braille characters. BRLTTY drives the cells to reflect a rectangular portion of the screen — referred to in the documentation as the window — so the user can read what would normally appear visually. Buttons or routing keys on the display itself send commands back to BRLTTY: move the window around the screen, toggle viewing options, copy text, switch virtual consoles, and so on.

Synthesized speech is the more widely known accessibility technology for blind computer users; the two complement each other rather than competing, and BRLTTY can drive a speech synthesizer alongside the braille display.

What BRLTTY does

• Reflects a configurable rectangular region of the screen as braille, with intelligent cursor tracking and routing.
• Translates output through pluggable text and contraction tables — English and French ship in the box; many more languages are available as add-on tables. Eight-dot computer braille and six-dot contracted braille are both supported.
• Implements a full screen-review feature set: highlighted-text inspection (attribute mode), cut-and-paste, smart copy of URLs and e-mail addresses, configurable cursor styles and blinking, and a preferences menu.
• Provides an on-line learn mode for discovering commands, optional speech output, an interactive on-line help facility, and a programmable C API (BrlAPI) for client applications.

Hardware support

BRLTTY supports 50+ braille display vendors and 12 speech-synthesis engines. The authoritative lists ship as machine-readable CSV files in this repository:

• Documents/braille-driver.csv — supported braille displays.
• Documents/speech-driver.csv — supported speech synthesizers.
• Documents/screen-driver.csv — supported screen drivers (Linux console, AT-SPI desktops, tmux, Android, etc.).

Linux is the primary platform. Android, Windows, and Hurd are supported with varying degrees of completeness — see Documents/README.Android, Documents/README.Windows, and the other platform-specific READMEs in Documents/.

Documentation

• The BRLTTY Reference Manual is the user-facing reference: installation, command list, key bindings, preferences, configuration-file syntax, and feature descriptions. A French translation lives in Documents/Manual-BRLTTY/French/.
• The BrlAPI Reference Manual covers the C API for client applications.
• The Documents/README.* topic family drills deeper into specific subjects: text tables, contraction tables, attributes tables, key tables, Bluetooth, devices, customization, systemd integration, and platform-specific notes.
• Documents/brltty.conf is the comment-rich configuration-file template most distributions install as /etc/brltty.conf. It is the authoritative directive-syntax reference.
• The brltty(1) and brlapi(3) man pages document the command-line interface and the C API.

Getting help

• Mailing list: post to BRLTTY@brltty.app; subscribe at http://brltty.app/mailman/listinfo/brltty.
• Bug reports and feature requests: the project's GitHub issue tracker. A useful bug report typically includes the BRLTTY version (brltty -V), your braille-display model, the host OS and version, your configuration file, and a debug-level startup log captured with brltty -n -e -l debug.

Building from source

Most Linux distributions ship BRLTTY as a package; install it with your distribution's package manager unless you specifically need a custom build.

To build from a fresh source checkout:

./autogen
./configure
make
make install

./configure --help lists every available build option; defaults are appropriate for most environments. Driver-specific notes live in the README file inside each Drivers/Braille/<X>/ and Drivers/Speech/<X>/ subdirectory.

License

BRLTTY is free software, distributed under version 2.1 or later of the GNU Lesser General Public License. It comes with absolutely no warranty. The full license text ships in LICENSE-LGPL at the top of the source tree.

Maintainers

BRLTTY is currently maintained by Dave Mielke. The active team list and contributor history live on the project's home page at http://brltty.app/.