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

[Nikhil Nair]

Hi again,

I take it, from the silence, that my assumption was wrong, and no one (or
at least, no one who regularly reads this list) has experience with Freedom
Scientific displays under the Windows version of BRLTTY.

In that case, it looks like I'll be doing some experimenting myself, to get
my setup working.

One thing it would be helpful to hear: when people have got BRLTTY working
on Windows, have they used the manufacturer's driver, or gone direct via,
say, USB?  I'd particularly like to hear which was used when sharing the
display with JAWS (the section about that in the instructions was very
thorough - whoever wrote that obviously knew their stuff).  I do appreciate
that this may well be with braille displays from manufacturers other than
Freedom Scientific, but I'm guessing the overall approach may well be
similar.

I have quite a number of things to try; hopefully your experiences may help
me work out which one to attempt first.

Of course, once I get this working, I'll report back on what worked best,
so, hopefully, other people in the future will just be able to follow
simple instructions for this, rather than having to work it out
themselves.

Cheers,

Nikhil.


On Mon, 22 Jul 2019, Nikhil Nair wrote:

> 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.
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