[Athen] Alva Braille Display questions

Mary Stores mstores at indiana.edu
Thu May 13 06:43:27 PDT 2010


Hello, Sean.

It has been my experience that when the Alva Satellite is turned on, it
emits a flat chime. After the display has established a connection, it
emits four descending notes. When you turn it on, do the pins pop up
for a few minutes, or do they stay flat even after the chime sounds to
say that the display is tuend on? My satellite displays the following
message in Braille: "Alva Satellite Waiting For connection..."

JAWS 11 should come with the most recent updated Braille drivers. I
believe the option to install them is in the installation wizard when
you first install JAWS, so I don't think you have to search on the web
for them.

Mary

Quoting Sean J Keegan <skeegan at stanford.edu>:


> Hello all,

>

> I have been trying to get two Alva Braille displays working and not

> having any success. I am working with an Alva 570 Satellite Pro and

> an Alva Delphi 440. Both are at least several years old.

>

> With the Alva 570 Satellite Pro - I am connecting it to a Windows XP

> machine via the USB cable. I am unable to get ANY of the pins to

> respond. The display makes a noise when I turn it on or off, but the

> pins all stay flat (note - it is not the usual noise I remember with

> this display, but rather just a flat chime). If I plug or unplug the

> USB cable, Windows responds with its own notification that a USB

> device has been unplugged or plugged-in. I included the display for

> JAWS 11 and checked via Options > Braille and it does show up as the

> default braille device. No matter what I have done, all the pins

> stay flat. In all honesty, I am a bit stumped as my previous

> experiences with this display is that it just worked with Windows XP

> (yes, there was a bit of configuration necessary with a

> screen-reader, but the Braille display itself functioned).

>

> With the Alva Delphi 440 - I am connecting it to the same Windows XP

> machine, but via the serial cable (does not offer USB). I do get

> some Braille characters when I turn on the device, so that is a minor

> improvement, but the text is static. I also went into JAWS 11 and

> added this Braille display, but it did nothing for actually changing

> the content in the cells. I did find the floppy disk that specifies

> the drivers, but I am dealing with a computer with no floppy drive,

> so I need to find a portable drive before I can actually try that

> option.

>

> At this point, the only thing I can think of is to get a portable

> floppy drive and try to install the drivers for both Braille

> displays. I can understand this may be the case for the Delphi 440,

> but the fact that there is no response from the Satellite Pro has me

> a bit concerned that even adding the drivers may not elicit a

> response (and that is *not* a cheap display).

>

> I searched the Web to see if I could download the drivers, but did

> not have much success (I only looked for about 20 min. though). If

> anyone has been down this road, I would appreciate any thoughts or

> ideas.

>

> Take care,

> Sean

>

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