[BRLTTY] Using BRLTTY with Orbit Reader 20 on Android and Windows with NVDA

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Lanie Molinar on 2021/06/07 at 17:26 -0500]

>Do I need to have BrailleBack enabled if BRLTTY is running?

Strictly speaking, they're entirely independent apps and can both be running at the same time. The one costraint is that they shouldn't both be trying to communicate with the same braille device at the same time. In that case (which I think is your case), only one of them should be enabled at a time.

>is there anything special I need to do to make TalkBack and BRLTTY work together?

They work fine together. The technical reason is that both of them control and follow an Android feature called Accessibiity Focus. If you navigate with screen gestrues then brltty will follow along. Doing the navigation with brltty is a little different. You can move the braille display anywhere you want, just like on any screen, and then, whenever you want, you can bring the accessibility focus, and, therefore, TalkBack, to where you are by pressing the leftmost routing key. Putting it another way, brltty treats accessibility focus as though it were the cursor.

>On Windows, I'm having some problems. I installed BRLTTY without a problem, but I can't get it to work with NVDA. I tried installing BRLAPI the way the docs say to do, but it won't install. It keeps saying Python version -32 is required and wasn't found in my registry.

I myself am not a Windows user, but my guess is that it's saying that something is wanting 32-bit Python. Until recently, brltty was built with 32-bit Python. The latest release for sure, however, whch is 6.3, was built with 64-bit Python. I think that the latest NVDA was also built with 64-bit Python.

>Finally, I tried running BRLTTY in
>debug mode in case the log helps. Here's what that showed:
...
>configuration directive specified more than once: braille-driver
...
>configuration directive specified more than once: braille-device

It looks like you tried to use the configurator several times. That dosn't work. The configurator is, at least for now, only meant to be used the first time. After that, you need to edit the file /etc/brltty.conf. Look for the configurator-added braille-driver and braille-device lines at the bottom. Edit the ones that are there - don't add duplicate lines. For the Orbit, the driver should be bm (i.e. the Baum driver).

>messages locale not found: en_US

Don't worry about these. They do show up in the log far too often at the moment. This will be fixed.

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