Comment 1 by jteh on 2010-10-28 06:32
See also #808, which covers entry of braille from a braille display.

I'm not sure this is really within the scope of a screen reader. A blind user can use a normal keyboard just like anyone else. Braille input might be nice, but I wonder whether this should be provided by another application instead of the screen reader.
Changes:
Milestone changed from None to None

Comment 2 by aleksey_s (in reply to comment 1) on 2010-10-28 06:44
Replying to jteh:

I'm not sure this is really within the scope of a screen reader. A blind user can use a normal keyboard just like anyone else. Braille input might be nice, but I wonder whether this should be provided by another application instead of the screen reader.

While I am also against inclusion of all sort of things into a screenreader like some vendors do, but here I feel this is a job of screenreader. One rarely uses braille display without screenreader, and since there is non any standart program in windows for this task, and since we're going to let script calls from the braille display, I do believe that we should allow general control of the system from the display with help of NVDA.

Comment 3 by pvagner (in reply to comment 2) on 2010-10-28 07:01
Replying to aleksey_s:
One rarely uses braille display without screenreader, and since there is non any standart program in windows for this task, and since we're going to let script calls from the braille display, I do believe that we should allow general control of the system from the display with help of NVDA.
I think the original requester asks for ability to use a part of the standard querty keyboard to emulate braille like keyboard to input characters.
Here is a very simple braille emulator written by my friend Peter Lecky. It's writen in autohotkey scripting. It has some limitations but if you like see for your-self. It's also not a standard application but does the job well.
http://cezap.sk/~lecky/rb/index.php?lang=2&page=3
See towards the bottom of the page.

Comment 4 by jteh (in reply to comment 2) on 2010-10-28 07:44
Replying to aleksey_s:

One rarely uses braille display without screenreader, and since there is non any standart program in windows for this task, and since we're going to let script calls from the braille display, I do believe that we should allow general control of the system from the display with help of NVDA.

Lex, this is covered by #808. This ticket is referring to entry of braille on the standard keyboard.

Comment 5 by Bernd on 2011-06-19 23:11
I think we should close this ticket as wontfix because we have a few Problems:

1. What is when NVDA freezes or hangs and a user gets help by an sighted person and it isn't possible to dismiss this mode?
2. If we would have a command NVDA+shift+5 NVDA would have to check NVDA+Shift+5 and NVDA+%

Comment 6 by briang1 on 2011-06-20 10:20
There is another problem also, in that not all keyboards can do this trick. I've seen numerous comments about problems with software which allows this, with lists of keyboards that don't work, many of them built in laptop ones. I'm no hardware guru, but I suspect its the detection of enough simultanious keys that can cause the issues.
Have a look at I think Duxbury.. did I spell this right, I think they make transcription software that allows this

Comment 7 by jteh on 2013-01-09 11:53
I provided a global plugin to do this as part of my testing of #808. Whether this should be part of NVDA itself is yet to be determined, but my feeling right now is that it should be an add-on.
Changes:
Changed title from "NVDA should support 6-keys brailling (using the keyboard instead of a braille display) on the system" to "Support for braille input from the PC keyboard"

@jcsteh commented:

I provided a global plugin to do this as part of my testing of #808. Whether this should be part of NVDA itself is yet to be determined, but my feeling right now is that it should be an add-on.

I assume your thoughts haven't changed yet? In that case, I guess this can be closed.

I think this is still best as an add-on. It's available as the PC Keyboard Braille Input add-on.