Question About Focus 40 Blue Braille Display

By Shelby Craig, 4 May, 2018

Forum
Braille on Apple Products

Hello all,
I am currently attending college and preparing to take an Arabic class next semester. As it turns out, I will have to teach myself the Arabic braille code and I remember a small issue I encountered last semester while taking my upper-level Spanish classes. During the classes, I used my braille display to read my Spanish material and, for the most part, it worked well.
However, it was frustrating at times because I was reading it using the same configurations that I use to read standard literary braille. I was wondering if there is a way to make it so that my braille display uses automatic language output. For example, when reading standard English, I would see English on the display. But if I want to switch to Arabic, I want to read Arabic braille on the display. Is there a way to tweak the settings to make this a reality? I hope that my question makes sense. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Options

Comments

By TJT 2001 on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - 15:47

You haven't mentioned what device your Focus is connected to, so I'm going to assume you're using an iOS device.

There is a process called "tagging" where a document author adds metadata to the document to let readers know what language/s the text is written in. If the material you are reading has been tagged correctly and the VoiceOver voice that you use for other purposes has been set as your default voice, VoiceOver will speak in a voice appropriate to the language you are reading when it encounters text in another language. Braille output will also change to match the language.

However, if the document has not been tagged, VoiceOver will need to be told to change the language. To do this, add an Arabic voice to your language rotor. Then, when you encounter text written in Arabic, you may need to change the VoiceOver voice manually to Arabic. When you do this, braille output should also change.

If I am mistaken and you need instructions for another operating system, please post here and someone can help you. If you like, you could also inform us where you are obtaining the material from, and we can give you instructions on how someone can tag material correctly for that platform.

By Shelby Craig on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - 15:47

Is this true for the iPhone as well as the Mac? I forgot to mention I was using an iPhone in my last post.

By TJT 2001 on Tuesday, May 22, 2018 - 15:47

In my first post, I said that the instructions apply to iOS devices. I cannot speak for the Mac.