Hi all:
I have a supported braille display. I’ve done everything in the user guide and I’ve connected it to my iPhone 14Pro running the latest update not in beta. Whilst my user guide tells me a lot about navigating through the file/book, taking notes and other such things, it does not tell me about how to actually read these files. They are in zip folders if that helps. I’ve read a lot of people talking about DropBox, and I’ve got that app, but I don’t really know what to do. Can someone clue a girl in, please?
Comments
Bard can do that.
If you are in the U.S. and are a bard user, you can definitely read .brf books with it on your braille display. Otherwise, I think you're stuck with reading directly on the display using its own software.
Reading on the Braille display
I find it much easier to read Braille books on my Braille display using its native software. On my Humanware display, that's Victor Reader Stream. The Humanware display also has a .brf file editor called KeyBrief or something like that, intended primarily for creating and editing .brf files. But you could use it to read .brf files too.
The interface for reading Braille books using the BARD Mobile app is really clumsy. And my sincere hope is that someone will prove me wrong and post a complete guide, because I'd love for that to actually work well.
New feature
I've read your request, so I am adding the import of .brf as a feature of Speech Central.
This will work by importing brf files as the plain text (that way you can also read them aloud), and braille display will display it as it would any other text from Speech Central (which basically just works according to the users that I have contacted thus far).
I have implemented the feature today, but I can't say for sure when it will be released to the end users as I have a completely new branch for future development which has been in work for almost a year now. I expect it to be released this year, so it shouldn't be that far off now.
Also this will be limited just to English language characters in Braille.
Speech Central
It would definitely be nice to be able to read .brf files as text on the iPhone. If one could read them on the display, that would help too, the one thing which often happens when reading text, though, is that things like paragraph indentations go away, that's one thing that you get by reading natively with a display instead of through the iPhone.
That would certainly make me try Speech Central
That would be very helpful to have the .brf extension something that would be readable on iOS. Converting to text on the fly for those who prefer their files to also have audio would be handy.
BARD can import books
So if you are a BARD user, even if you don't want to download from NLS, it will import books from sources like DropBox. Read its user guide.