Greg. I too am interested on working on this process. I've recently
acquired a braille display (a Navigator 80) and as soon as I can
scrounge a power supply for it, I'm planning on working out to make
it talk to the mac and vice versa. One idea you may wish to examine
is the possibility of having the text displayed in the caption panel
be sent to the usb port. From what I understand, this caption panel
displays the same thing vo speaks, so there's your text ready to go w/
o having to dig for it. Perhaps apple could give you/us the
information to access this information. Then it would be a simple
matter of simply dumping the text from the caption panel into the usb
output stream.
In any case, let me know what you find out, and perhaps we can
compare notes on this after I get my power supply and begin poking
around.
On Mar 16, 2006, at 11:03 AM, Greg Kearney wrote:
I have been doing some early work with braille terminal display on
a Mac
here is what I have found so far using a BrailleNote BT.
The BrailleNote BT uses serial communications so you will need a
USB to
serial device.
I am able to trap and display all the spoken prompts and information
from the BrailleNote on the Mac using Zterm or simply opening up the
/dev device.
I can send, with limited success, text to the BrailleNote in braille
terminal mode. I have a support request in to Humanware to get the
technical specification for communicating with the braille terminal.
I need to find out how to trap the text strings that VoiceOver
reads so
they can be sent out to the BrailleNote.
The process or something similar should work for most other braille
displays including newer USB devices. Anyone who wants to send me
one is
welcome to do so. :)
Greg Kearney
