Inputting braille.

But it's also entirely possible I didn't. I usually do though. I'll give it a try, thanks! Well I just tried here, with BKI, and that didn't help. I'll bust out the display and play with it in various things though and see if it makes a difference.

E.g. BSI seems to regularly crash Messages. That's too bad because it seemed like a great place to practice it. It types for so long and then it seems to have issues, unless Messages has a character limit I'm hitting or something. I don't think so though, since I can type longer messages on the Mac.

Well, the problem doesn't seem to be contractions, or interacting. I set the input to UEB uncontracted, I have the box checked to match input and output tables. I opened up a new document in TextEdit, interacted with VO-down, hit VO-y to turn on braille input, and started typing the alphabet, with a space between each letter. It got to 'y' followed by a space. I toggled it off and back on, and tried typing 'z', it wouldn't take it.

I set input back to US contracted, same experiment. It expanded contractions this time, but it got to 'you', i.e. 'y', followed by a space, just like it did with UEB uncontracted.

I haven't tried the display yet, but considering it did the exact same thing as braille input when I just tried typing words into TextEdit, I don't imagine there's going to be any difference in what happens with the display vs. braille keyboard input. I'm running Mac OS 26.5.1, which should be the latest version, unless I missed something in the last couple days.

I think the weird thing for me is that the display does the exact same thing. I thought this was a bug in braille keyboard input when I first tried it out and didn't really worry about it, figuring if I really wanted to try typing in braille, I have a display. I guess, just to be thorough, I could use the display as a USB device, in both cases keyboard and display were connected via Bluetooth. I guess I could try the keyboard too, assuming it connects and doesn't just charge via USB.

Anyway, if anybody has any more thoughts, either possible fixes or possible testing ideas, I'd love to hear them. Barring that, do I just contact Apple and pay them for the tech support, if I want them to try and solve it? I'll submit feedback at some point if I can't get it working, but I'd like to make sure it's not some problem I have or setting that's misconfigured or such. If I'm going to submit feedback that something's broken, I'd like to be sure it is really broken before I do that.

OK, the secret might be to type very very slowly.

Now I'm done with braille input. I braille pretty slowly, and apparently, I'm too fast for it? If I type the alphabet in TextEdit and wait maybe a half a second between the letter followed by space, and typing the next letter, it gets all of them. This is both with BKI and input from the display connected via USB. Again, I don't think it's the translation of contractions, I'm guessing the same thing would happen if I did UEB uncontracted.

Is this a thing anybody else is noticing? I know we've got some braille display users here. I didn't readily see a setting that would affect this in VO utility/braille, but maybe I need to look under keyboard in System Settings? I can't imagine typing this slowly is functional for anybody. I haven't majorly typed braille in years, so I'm pretty slow and rusty at it. There's no way people better than I am would actually put up with this, assuming that's what's going on.

I think other than setting the tables to US contracted, I haven't changed any defaults. But really, anything's possible at this point, I suppose.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting they're the same, as such. I'm just seeing the same behavior, whether I'm using braille keyboard input, or Perkins-style input from my braille display. This happens whether the display is connected via USB or Bluetooth. If it matters though, since they're different, I'm way more interested in figuring out what's going on with the display.

To be fair, I think the NLS eReader only mentions connecting to iOS as a display, at least I think it did last time I looked, but that was a while ago. I'd assume it works with just about anything though, it more or less worked with NVDA back when I was running Windows. Maybe it has an issue with the Mac though. I'll try hooking it back up and going into the display settings and seeing if anything jumps out at me.

I'm ignoring braille keyboard input and just using a display now. Still need to type slow, this is with RTFC UEB contracted, I haven't tried Liblewis contracted US but I don't expect any other results. Also, for some reason, if I write some text, select it all and delete it, then write more text slower to see if I can get it all, the last part of the text ends up at the beginning. For example: "it? I wonder if I write slower, will TextEdit take "

So that's weird. But yeah, if I write too fast, same thing, it gets so many words/characters, and then just stops, and seems to refuse to take anything else, unless I delete the text and start over.

Just for fun, my next thing will probably be to try pairing with the phone, to see if there are any differences. I mean, that won't help with the Mac, but you know, it's something to do when you're bored. I should try running the Windows VM and seeing how it works with NVDA. I don't remember writing much with it, the last time I tried it on Windows I just remember the annoying thing of having to use the actual keyboard to get it to react to things, e.g. if I connected the display and was on a web page, nothing would show up on the display until I hit an arrow on the keyboard. So it's not like braille on Windows was something I ever figured out either.

Fun times!