[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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