hey, one thing I have to tell you all, that I really really really love about IOS, is I love its braille display support, specifically the number and variety of braille input and output languages! As far as I know, IOS is the only way or the only device with a screen reader that will give you braille display output for 6-dot Japanese braille on your favorite refreshable display. NVDA and Jaws on windows will not, orca on linux will not, talkback and brailleback on android and liblouis does not offer Japanese braille. As far as I know, IOS with voiceover is the only device and screen reader where I can pull up a native Japanese website or get a translation from google translate and in less than a second I have the 6-dot Japanese braille code showing on my display. And voiceover supports many many languages for refreshable braille output that windows and Linux and android and liblouis does not.
Comments
That's really good to know!
Hi Josh,
That's just another really nice thing about Apple. So glad for you. Here's to continued success!
agree
Last time I tried using my braille display on a mac I didn't find it very good. I was always having to move between the display to read, and the Apple keyboard to navigate with VO. Not at all efficient. Although, this was under High Sierra. No idea if they've made any improvements in Catalina. I find Braille on iOS much more usable, although it, too, has its problems. I don't use multiple braille languages though, so don't have an opinion on that.
Braille is one of the things that has me tempted to pick up a Surface Go or Pro. because of the ability to run JAWS entirely from the display. I hate that dang spacebar on my 4th gen Focus 40 blue though. lol
Braille on Mac OS
Pepper Fox: what kinds of issues are you having with braille on Mac OS? I used to use it with few issues under Mountain Lion, but I sold my Mac to pay for my hearing aids, so have not tested or provided any feedback to Apple in quite awhile concerning braille on Mac OS.
To Brian
When you say you had to switch between your QWERTY keyboard and braille display, what tasks required you to do that? As far as I know, most VoiceOver functions have a braille display equivalent command.
As for the Surface Go versus Pro, I'd recommend a Pro for sure, unless you plan to only use it with Narrator. I won't say more beyond that, as this is a forum for Apple stuff. Smiles.
Maybe it was just my display,
Maybe it was just my display, but I didn't find that it was as configurable as it is on iOS. On my iPhone I can use the rocker buttons on the sides of the display to flick through items and whatever the rotor is set to. That makes for less moving my hands around. Couldn't do that on the Mac. I also found it harder to use the Perkins keyboard for input, though I didn't play with it a lot. All of that would've been really useful in the job I had at the time.
On my personal MBP I also found that some commands would work if I connected my display via USB, but not bluetooth.