The news is somewhat spoiled by the lack of HID support, yes. These devices are prohibitively expensive still, and a big company like Google arbitrarily deciding that a particular standard people are trying to adopt for braille displays is not worth their time just sounds like the usual "We'll do just enough to make it look like we're making an effort" that I feel Google is somewhat infamous for where accessibility is concerned. I'm not saaying Android isn't accessible, it certainly can be, but that mostly isn't because of Google's efforts imho.

Certainly it is a step towards the correct direction.

It's a shame that it doesn't seem to support braille displays that connect through the HID standard, at least for now. This means that people who use some recently released braille displays still won't be able to connect them to Android devices.

Wait a sec, HID is not supported? This seems like deliberate mischief. Why on earth avoid supporting an open common standard? Don't think money is involved, NVDA added it with a software update.

But again, Google says, to quote: "We are grateful to the community for their ongoing feedback that makes features like these possible. This is just the first step forward in developing this integration, and we can’t wait to do even more to expand the feature and to create even more related capabilities."

So, I bet they are gonna improove things more. But yeah, not giving HID support from get go is a shame, specially from a company which talks about open source things this much.

The source for quote: https://blog.google/products/android/braille-display-talkback/

It's definitely promising. Once TalkBack has VoiceOver Recognition-like features, I'll definitely consider switching over.