[BRLTTY] Returning to BRLTTY - and asking for help with Windows/FS Focus Blue setup

[Nikhil Nair]

Hi folks!

Yeah, it's been a long time... more than 20 years since I left the project
as a developer, and about 16 years since my last Braille display gave up
the ghost, and circumstances pushed me into becoming (shudder) a
Windows/speech user, rather than the Linux/Braille user I'd be before.

To say I'm impressed with all the hard work the main developers, and all
the other contributors over the years, have done on this project would be a
huge understatement.  I feel rather humbled, to be honest - the project has
grown far beyond what I could have imagined back in my own BRLTTY developer
days.  Speaking simply as a user: thank you, all of you!

I bought a Focus Blue 40 recently, assuming I'd be using it with JAWS.  And
yes, that works reasonably well, but the functionality for console apps (I
use Windows OpenSSH quite a lot, to connect to remote Linux hosts) was
significantly worse than what I remembered of BRLTTY on my old
CombiBraille.  So, here I am!  I was absolutely delighted to find out
there's a Windows port of BRLTTY - I wasn't expecting that at all.

However, I'm having quite a bit of trouble even getting started; I'm hoping
you can help me out.  I found the Windows instructions, and did my best to
follow them.

Setup: Windows 10, JAWS 2018 using the Focus Blue 40 via USB, Braille sleep
mode enabled globally (to start with) so that JAWS releases all control of
the Braille display.

I downloaded the installer (the .exe) for BRLTTY 6.0-1 libusb-1.0, and
installed with the default path, selecting Freedom Scientific, and USB: for
the port.  I'm aware that I may have gone wrong there: while I chose USB,
I'm not sure if that was correct - whether I'm supposed to use the
manufacturer's driver, and hence a virtual serial port, or some such.  The
notes also said that, if I needed to use the manufacturer's driver, and if
it doesn't provide a virtual serial port, then I should use the other
libusb version.  Honestly, I'm feeling a little at sea with this stuff, as
I just don't have that level of technical knowledge about the Focus Blue
displays running on Windows, and I'm not sure where I'm supposed to get
that sort of info.  There were, if I recall correctly, about 16 serial
ports I could choose between, which means trial and error probably wasn't a
good approach!

It occurs to me that, in trying to work this out myself, I'm probably
reinventing the wheel, as someone else has probably got this combination
working before - or, very likely, quite a few someones, come to that.  So,
rather than debugging my setup, it might be easier for someone to tell me
what I should have done to get BRLTTY working with Windows 10, FS Focus
Blue, and sharing the display with JAWS.  (And just to clarify that, the
Focus has already been working with JAWS, so whatever manufacturer's driver
there is is already installed and working there.)

If it helps, though, I can provide debug.log and brltty.conf files; just
let me know what's easiest.

I do have a couple of (very minor) bug reports re the Windows setup, when
you run BRLTTY in debugging mode:

1.  I gather from reading the .bat file that it's supposed to direct you to
read the file (for instance) C:\Program Files (x86)\BRLTTY\debug.log.
However, if you get a lot of errors (as I did), that message scrolls off
the screen; an inexperienced user then doesn't know what file to look for,
and where.  Not sure what the ideal solution would be; perhaps prompting
for the user to press return to acknowledge that message, before actually
starting BRLTTY?

2.  If you run run-debug.bat with normal user privileges (which is what
normally happens if you just click on the file itself from within Explorer,
or if you run it via the start menu shortcut), it doesn't create a
debug.log file, because the .bat file doesn't have write access to the
BRLTTY folder.  I had to deliberately run it with administrator privileges
in order to get the debug.log file to appear.

Anyway, hope those help.

Cheers,

Nikhil.