[BRLTTY] Orbit Writer bluetooth braille keyboard, key presses do nothing, BRLTTY 5.5 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Emma Sajic esajic at mac.com
Sun Jun 26 08:28:33 EDT 2022


Hi Dave,
Thanks for this good advice! Yes I'm using a GUI (Ubuntu Budgie 
desktop). I have now managed to get further.

I did some searching of the mailing list archives and found that the 
reason I was getting the error messages about "braille driver 
initialization failed" / "braille driver not found" was because I hadn't 
installed libbluetooth-dev package before building brltty.

This is what I did to fix that:

# Uninstall brltty as root
sudo su -
cd /home/emma/repos/brltty
make uninstall

# Install libbluetooth-dev
apt-get install libbluetooth-dev

# Clean, rebuild and reinstall BRLTTY
make clean
./autogen
./configure
make install

After doing this, Bluetooth was working OK but I couldn't start xbrlapi. 
I did some more mail archive searching and discovered that I needed to 
make sure /etc/brlapi.key is world-readable (mine wasn't, it was 
read-write for owner and no permissions for group or others).

chmod ugo+r /etc/brlapi.key

Then I could start up brltty and xbrlapi OK:

# In one console run brltty in the foreground

sudo brltty -n -e -ldebug -b bm -d bluetooth:5C:B6:CC:86:F3:75 -L 
/tmp/brltty-bluetooth.log

# In another console window as my personal user (not root), run xbrlapi 
in quiet mode in the foreground

xbrlapi --quiet

After doing this I can type lower case letters OK with my Orbit Writer 
keyboard which is progress.

Looks like the Orbit key bindings are getting picked up OK

https://brltty.app/doc/KeyBindings/brl-bm-orbit.html

BRLTTY is initially configured to use US Computer Braille for keyboard input
https://brltty.app/doc/Manual-BRLTTY/English/BRLTTY-6.html
https://brltty.app/doc/Manual-BRLTTY/English/BRLTTY-14.html

I can type upper case letters by adding dot 7 to the lower case letter.

But when I try to type anything else in Computer Braille for example the 
at sign, which is supposed to be dots 4 and 7, or Computer Braille 
numbers, I don't get the output I expected. For example dots 4 and 7 
produces an AE symbol.

I've tried these options (and also tried with Orca on or off) but they 
don't alter the output:
set braille typing mode text: Space+Dots467
set contracted/computer braille: Space+Dots1245


Log attached of me typing in US Computer Braille
hello @

The output I actually get is
hello Æ

Help much appreciated,
Cheers!
Emma
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