Re: Dectalk USB Parameters

[Peter Korn <Peter Korn Sun COM>]

Hi Beth,

> I have contacted Access Solutions, the maker of the Dectalk USB and informed
> them of the problem that I was having with the unit.  Unfortunately,
> although the gentleman I spoke with was extremely knowledgeable about
> Dectalk and its behavior in terms of serial mode communications, he was not
> aware of Gnopernicus.  I tried my best to explain the problem as best I
> could.  However, since I am not a programmer, I am not sure how well I did.
> He seemed very willing to work on resolving this issue so that others don't
> have problems with Linux or any other screen readers.
>
> 	Thanks to everyone for the public and private responses I have
> received on this matter.

I'm glad you are moving toward resolving this with Access Solutions.  I think 
the most critical things are:

 1. That the DECTalk Express can be "killed" with a particular sequence
    of characters sent to it.  This is fundamentally a DECTalk Express
    issue.  It doesn't really have anything to do with Gnopnericus.  Some
    other application could have done the same thing.

 2. That Gnopernicus by default launches wanting to talk to a particular
    Braille device, and that this is unexpected by users and can have
    unintended side effects (such as your rather catastrophic one).

There has been some discussion in this thread about Gnopernicus "probing" the 
serial port trying to determine which Braille device is connected.  In 
discussions with BAUM engineering earlier today, I don't believe this to be 
the case.  From all that I've seen in this thread and from my own familiarity 
with Gnopernicus, I believe that #2 above is what happened.

It has been suggested that Gnopernicus NOT be launchable *initially* from the 
GUI, but rather that the first launching must instead be from the command line 
and that the options there then be taken by Gnopernicus and used thereafter. 
I personally think this is a mistake.  Too many magnification users need it to 
work.  We also introduce a significant impediment to localization by having 
Gnopernicus play a WAV file (rather than immediately default to using speech).

Personally, I think the appropriate solution is to have Gnopernicus either use 
only BrlAPI as Braille by default with no command-line options, or to not use 
Braille at all by default when launched with no command-line options.


Regards,

Peter Korn
Sun Accessibility team