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Old Braille Displays
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Howard Traxler <howard@...>
Is anyone using NVDA with an older Braille
Display? I have a couple of powerBrailles (a 40 and an 80) and an ALVA
ABT-380. It seems that some of you might be using BrlTTY to drive your
displays? I wonder if I could get some help getting started with this kind
of a setup? I'm thinking of getting a peripheral card with a parallel port
on it or getting a USB to RS-232 converter and wonder if anyone has experienced
this kind of project?
Thanks, anybody.
Howard |
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mattias
ALVA ABT-380 uses serialport
Skickades från E-post för Windows 10
Från: Howard Traxler
Is anyone using NVDA with an older Braille Display? I have a couple of powerBrailles (a 40 and an 80) and an ALVA ABT-380. It seems that some of you might be using BrlTTY to drive your displays? I wonder if I could get some help getting started with this kind of a setup? I'm thinking of getting a peripheral card with a parallel port on it or getting a USB to RS-232 converter and wonder if anyone has experienced this kind of project?
Thanks, anybody.
Howard
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Howard Traxler <howard@...>
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Yes, the ABT-380 uses serial and parallel.
For now, I'm still ok on that one. It's on an old win XP machine and I can
use an old version of jaws. . My win 10 machine will need to use my
powerbraille 80. Thanks
Howard
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Brian's Mail list account
I have a couple of the parallel port adaptors that plug into usb, and they seem to drive old printers fine. don't know about other things of course. I do have an rs 232 on my latest pc on a card and that seems to work fine as above. I guess it depends on how the Braille display uses it.
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Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal email to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Traxler" <howard@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2017 1:45 PM Subject: [nvda] Old Braille Displays Is anyone using NVDA with an older Braille Display? I have a couple of powerBrailles (a 40 and an 80) and an ALVA ABT-380. It seems that some of you might be using BrlTTY to drive your displays? I wonder if I could get some help getting started with this kind of a setup? I'm thinking of getting a peripheral card with a parallel port on it or getting a USB to RS-232 converter and wonder if anyone has experienced this kind of project? Thanks, anybody. Howard |
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Brian's Mail list account
The port converters are very cheap now and just plug into the usb, so it would be relatively easy to see if it can work that way.
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Brian bglists@... Sent via blueyonder. Please address personal email to:- briang1@..., putting 'Brian Gaff' in the display name field. ----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Traxler" <howard@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2017 4:29 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] Old Braille Displays Yes, the ABT-380 uses serial and parallel. For now, I'm still ok on that one. It's on an old win XP machine and I can use an old version of jaws. . My win 10 machine will need to use my powerbraille 80. Thanks Howard ----- Original Message ----- From: mattias To: nvda@nvda.groups.io Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2017 9:48 AM Subject: Re: [nvda] Old Braille Displays ALVA ABT-380 uses serialport Skickades från E-post för Windows 10 Från: Howard Traxler Skickat: den 8 oktober 2017 14:45 Till: nvda@nvda.groups.io Ämne: [nvda] Old Braille Displays Is anyone using NVDA with an older Braille Display? I have a couple of powerBrailles (a 40 and an 80) and an ALVA ABT-380. It seems that some of you might be using BrlTTY to drive your displays? I wonder if I could get some help getting started with this kind of a setup? I'm thinking of getting a peripheral card with a parallel port on it or getting a USB to RS-232 converter and wonder if anyone has experienced this kind of project? Thanks, anybody. Howard |
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Howard Traxler <howard@...>
The last few JAWS releases did not support the powerbrailles in serial. So, one had to get a parallel cable to use jaws. Newer computers no longer have parallel ports. Now, it seems that NVDA does not have drivers for the powerbraille or the alva. Hence, I wondered if there's a way to used some other software to drive those displays?
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Howard ----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian's Mail list account via Groups.Io" <bglists@...> To: <nvda@nvda.groups.io> Sent: Sunday, October 08, 2017 12:19 PM Subject: Re: [nvda] Old Braille Displays I have a couple of the parallel port adaptors that plug into usb, and they seem to drive old printers fine. don't know about other things of course. I do have an rs 232 on my latest pc on a card and that seems to work fine as above. I guess it depends on how the Braille display uses it. |
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Deborah Armstrong <debee@...>
I have used a PB40 and a Navigator for years with NVDA. Not quite as polished as JAWS support, but quite good, especially when you do object nav.
The trick is to choose brltty as your driver and configure brltty. Now that brltty is part of Windows 10 it's even easier. But basically you want to look at c:\program files (x86) \brltty\etc\brltty.conf which is its configuration file. It's a linuxthing. kind of like .ini files in old versions of Windows, these conf files. The last two lines should read braille-device serial:com1 braille-driver ts of course you'd change your port if it's not com1. Brltty has no parallel port support at all. My husband who is sighted actually wrote a parallel port driver for the PowerBraille, because he worked for TSI at the time. But they never released it and when Freedom bought the PowerBraille it became their property so unfortunately it's not possible for him to share the code. That has saddened him over the years, but breaking the law isn't something we do. The items in a conf file that follow pound (number) signs are comments. The automatic configuration (pick "configure brltty" from the start menu is rather poorly written and does make mistakes. In particular it doesn't know if the file already has configurations for other devices. You'll have to piece together how to do all this with the Nvda documentation on brltty and the brltty docs itself which are very Linux-centric. But I can help and it does let Nvda support anything that Brltty can support, which is most of those old displays. There are two-letter codes for each display in the brltty docs. And one good thing is that any usb to serial adapter that works with Windows is good enough for brltty. It's not picky. |
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