Re: Progress With Braille output!

[Jason White <jasonw ariel ucs unimelb edu au>]

John J. Boyer writes:
 > 
 > I am now getting some screenreader output from Gnopernicus on my Alva320 
 > Braille Terminal. When I press arrow keys on the keyboard the display 
 > shows various items on the Gnopernicus menu. Enter seems to move to these 
 > items, but i can't read much because the keys on the front panel of the 
 > Alva320 don't work.

This is where Gnopernicus braille support gets interesting, in a
positive sense. Apparently you can change the assignment of
Gnopernicus commands to keys on the braille display via a
configuration dialogue. Of course, your problem might be at a lower
level (the protocol of your Alva might be different from that which
the driver is written to expect). I have absolutely no clue as to how
you would debug this, but the important point is to find out whether
the protocol is being handled correctly, and if so how Gnopernicus is
configured regarding the assignment of commands to braille keys.

With the Baum Vario display used at the CSUN demonstration, the
display keys worked correctly, needless to say.

One of the great advantages of braille display software written by
Baum has traditionally been its configurability: you can exercise a
high degree of control over what the various keys, routing buttons,
optical sensors etc., of the braille display actually do. For example,
with my INKA (which regrettably only runs under DOS at this point) I
have assigned window movement keys to the optical sensors above the
braille line so that I can move through a document, for example,
simply by touching sensors rather than by pressing keys on the braille
display.

The Gnopernicus braille subsystem uses XML configuration files to
specify the various parameters. I haven't looked into these in any
detail, though. When I find time to install and set up Gnopernicus I
plan to help test the INKA support and make sure that it works well.