Braille support on macOs?

The braille support on the mac is not super usable. I use the Focus displays and i have had nothing but problems. My display will disconnect at random times, and the braille cursor doesn't follow speech. If you rely on braille, stay away from Mac.

On Mac Braille support isn’t good.
I have used Mack for 4 years and go back to Windows.

That's not enough reason to switch from Windows to Mac, Braille on Mac is not that good in comparison to Windows. It is not perfect either on Windows. Anyways, it is usable but not great.

I use both a focus and a brilliant, sometimes I have random disconnects or the process which sends commands to the braille display decides to hang.
however that is not that many times I must say.
I find braille really useful for reading back my own written words and reading longford articles on the machine.
I don't know your requirements, consider all the key factors pro's and cons be fore you make the switch.

One thing I never saw working is braille during logging on to your Mac, so keep that in mind as well.

I just got one of the NLS HumanWare eReaders last year, and have only used it a little bit with the Mac and really not at all on iOS. That said, it seems to work okay on the Mac. I'm still trying to learn Unified English Braille as I used EBAE growing up. But my advice to you is give it a go and see what you think. A lot of this stuff solely depends on individual use-case scenarios. Hth and good luck.

Hi.
If you are trying to switch from windows to a mac, I wouldn't recommend it. Braille displays don't synchronyze with VoiceOver's speech correctly. So I would recommend staying on the Windows platform until Apple fixes this issue.
Thank you

Braille support is very good on Mac. I use Alva braille display and it is excellent. I have also used Focus braille display but it is the most horrible braille display. It was horrible even on Windows.

It's great to hear that Braille support works well with the Alva display. I appreciate your insights on the Focus display too; it seems many users have varying opinions on different devices. It's always helpful to hear what others find effective. Do you have any tips for optimizing Braille usage on macOS?

Well, make sure to check the compatibility of the Braille display and Mac. Apple has an article about that what displays are supported.
Just make sure that you are familiar with your Braille display. You can play around with the Braille settings on Mac to see what suits you the best.

I will actually ask all my questions for which I haven't been able to found an answer myself for over an year now in the hope that more knowledgable people will be able to help me and everyone else. Please note that I have already read Apple documentation on this topic before asking these.
1. We have Display text style under the Layout tab, but we also have Show text style and Show extended text style under Status. My understanding is that the options in Status are for when we click the status cell either at the left or the right of the display depending on our preferences. But then how does it interact/modify with the checkbox in Layout?
2. I know that it's something I messed up in my preferences, but if I have a line longer than the 40 cells on my focus 4th gen, I have the following and quite irritating behaviour.
A small, apparently random segment of the text from what I understand, will be shown at the left. Then, about half (if not more) of the display will remain empty, until I press one of the routing cursor in that empty space or move the keyboard cursor with the arrow keys til it's in the blank area shown on my device. From that point, voiceover will start displaying the rest of the line (as much as it can contain) along with the segment it was already showing, and whenever I move right it would cut out the beginning of the line and continue scrolling until the real end of the line... It's a bit hard to describe, but those who know what I am talking about will understand. For clarity purposes I will write all my braille settings and how I actually want it to behave, as much as possible. I have modified some of them so maybe the disliked behaviour shown above shouldn't even happen now, anyways.
Only the options checked are shown.
Translation tab
French 8 dot system
Match input and output tables
Translate after typing white space (I rarely write contracted braille anyway)
Equations use Nemeth code
I have ueb contracted and uncontracted, English 8 dots, and French 8 dots
Display tab
Use insertion point wrap
Turn pages when panning (is it why I can't pan write in a numeth equation with mathml on the web?)
Display text style
Show alert message (3s)
0.5s ignore chord duration
4.10 auto advanced duration
Status tab
Show general display status
Show extended general display status
Show text style
Show extended text style
Show status: right (I so much wish we couldn't show it at all)
I don't care how but I want the displaying of superscripts and subscripts accurate each time it's supported which isn't the case now, maybe I just don't understand how to read the announcement thing of voiceover?
And I want to just have the display show everything it can at a given time and pan right or left whenever needed in a line longer than 40 cells.
Thanks a lot!

I don’t know the answers to the questions but my Alva braille display doesn’t show any status because I have unchecked all status settings.
My braille table is Estonian. I have noticed that with English braille table I can’t remove the status. However, if I use Estonian table then they are completely removed, even when the show status setting is set to left.

First of, I want to point out that I use my Mac almost exclusively (99% of the time) with a Braille display. I use a 5th generation Focus 40 Blue, braille table is set to 8-dot system table (in my case German) for both input and output.
In my opinion, Braille was at its best in macOS Ventura (I don't know how it was before Big Sur, as I switched to Mac in 2021 when Big Sur was state of the art).
In Big Sur, braille and speech output were not synchronized at all. There were many issues, especially in Safari and all other applications that use WebKit as rendering engine for displaying web content.
With macOs Monterey, things got a lot better. Safari / WebKit no longer had strange issues like the Braille display displaying something completely different than the focus was actually set on.
With macOS Ventura, things got better again. While the Braille display did not cause the focus to follow the braille cursor when the braille output is panned in Monterey, this works almost flawlessly since macOS Ventura.
So since macOS Ventura, the sync between speech output and braille output works almost without problems. There are still some web pages that can cause problems, but it's been very rare lately. Hopefully, Apple gets that fixed as well very soon.
With macOS Sonoma, around the 14.3 version or so, a strange issue has been introduced that causes the braille display to no longer display long text paragraphs in Safari / WebKit-rendered content after they get VoiceOver focus. A workaround for this is interacting with the text and then stop interaction. Then, the paragraph is shown without problems, however it's pretty annoying and makes the use of Safari more inefficient as a Braille user. This issue is still present in the 14.7 Sonoma release, but fortunately got fixed with macOs Sequoia 15.0.
With macOs Sequoia 15.0, however, a new issue has been introduced: If you navigate around your system, text elements do not start at the beginning on the Braille display. This means that you have to pan the braille output to the left when that happens, as you otherwise only will see the end of the text element.

So I find it quite strange that many people in this thread wrote that it's very bad and substantiate their statement with problems that were fixed 2 years ago. Yes, Braille support is not perfect and there can be some bugs with a new update, but it's getting better and better.

It depends on the tasks you want to do with the Mac. Also, keep in mind that I don't have a whole picture as I don't use every feature that the Mac offers. But here are a few points that work well on my end:

- Programming (I use TextMate for Python and Xcode for Apple's OS-related stuff)
- Text processing with Pages (It's completely different than what you might know from Windows, but once you get how it works you can do that quite well). For example, I wrote more than 200. articles that got released on an online magazine with Pages (It was a job that I got paid for, so text processing was crucial)
- Mailing: The mail app works well for Braille users
- Web browsing: Braille works well there, except for the issue in the 14.7 Sonoma release that's currently running on my machine
- Overall navigation around the system: This is something that is, in my opinion, far better than it has ever been on Windows. All dialogs are shown on the braille display, on Windows (I used JAWS there), you need to change braille modes from surface (I hope that's how it's actually called in the English JAWS version) to structured and so on. That said, if an app is accessible with speech output on Mac, it will be accessible without problems for Braille users as well. On Windows, that's not always the case.

So, at least for me, the Mac has the better overall Braille experience. There are some quirks, but it gets better with every release since I've been using macOS as my main computing platform.
Once apple gets the described issue in Sequoia fixed, there is a quite stable Braille support on the Mac. I'd recommend to stick with macOS Sonoma until Apple fixes that issue.
P.S.: I'd further recommend that you check the "Show multiple items" option in VoiceOver utility > Braille > Layout. I find that output style to be more efficient. By default, macOS outputs elements that are next to each other at the same time on the Braille display and not only that one which currently has VoiceOver focus. By enabling this setting, this gets fixed.

I hope this longer post helps, if you have further questions, please let me know.

Regarding the text style braille settings, the display text style option display the text attributes inline. I don't use status cells, but I'd assume that the output there is more generic and not as detailed as provided by the display text style option.
For example, if a line of text has different formatting for each word, you will get that information with the display text style option.