Comment 1 by bramd on 2011-11-22 21:27
I just posted a first version of a native driver for the Optelec/Tieman Braille Voyager display on Bitbucket. The driver has been tested with a 44 cell Voyager display on USB.

Basic input/output works, but combinations of multiple keys are not yet implemented.

This driver requires the included voyager.dll and the Voyager USB driver to be installed.

The latest version can always be downloaded at:
https://bitbucket.org/bram/nvda-voyager/get/tip.zip

Clone the following Mercurial repository to hack on the source:
https://bitbucket.org/bram/nvda-voyager/
Changes:
Changed title from "Native driver for the tieman voyager Braille Display" to "Native driver for the Optelec/Tieman Voyager Braille Display"

Comment 2 by jteh on 2011-11-22 21:38
I seem to remember that there are only 32 bit USB drivers for this display. Is this correct? If so, we need to make sure we document that it will only work on 32 bit systems.

Comment 3 by bramd (in reply to comment 2) on 2011-11-26 16:56
Replying to jteh:

I seem to remember that there are only 32 bit USB drivers for this display. Is this correct? If so, we need to make sure we document that it will only work on 32 bit systems.

It seems so... The only driver I see in the Voyager SDK seems to be 32 bits, but I have no 64 bits system to test anything here. Furthermore, the USB driver seems to have timing issues after long usage on Windows 7, this has been confirmed with JAWS as well so it is not an issue in the NVDA driver.

I'll mail Optelec about this and see if there's a newer USB driver that might solve this.

By the way, is there some kind of central page to collect these drivers for braille displays that are not usable without installing certain drivers? If I remember correctly, only braille drivers that can work in a portable version without external dependencies are included in NVDA.

Comment 4 by jteh (in reply to comment 3) on 2012-01-18 01:20
Replying to bramd:

By the way, is there some kind of central page to collect these drivers for braille displays

Not yet.

that are not usable without installing certain drivers? If I remember correctly, only braille drivers that can work in a portable version without external dependencies are included in NVDA.

External dependencies are fine as long as they would normally be installed by the user for use with their display. In this case, the user would have to install the USB driver to use it with any screen reader. We prefer to avoid bundling additional dll files for such displays, as the driver really should install these dlls so they can be used by multiple clients without duplication.

Comment 5 by MHameed on 2012-09-22 09:11
@bram, Did you hear back from optelec re 32/64 bit, and the long usage problem?

Comment 6 by bramd (in reply to comment 5) on 2013-02-22 22:48
Replying to MHameed:

@bram, Did you hear back from optelec re 32/64 bit, and the long usage problem?

Not about the long usage timing issue. However, 64 bits drivers are not developed and since the display is not really supported anymore, there are no drivers planned.

Funny enough, NVDA is the only screenreader that might have a chance to get this display to work on Windows x64 through BRLTTY (I did not test this).

Furthermore, if anyone is interested in writing a low level USB driver, the protocol description is included in the Voyager SDK.

Comment 7 by bdorer on 2014-12-14 20:31
in this case should we close this ticket as wontfix?

Comment 8 by jteh (in reply to comment 7) on 2014-12-14 22:53
Replying to bdorer:

in this case should we close this ticket as wontfix?

No, because if someone wants to write a USB driver or similar (as unlikely as that is), we would still accept a patch to support this.

Comment 9 by jteh on 2014-12-14 22:54
On second thoughts, let's close this as cantfix for now and reopen if someone decides to write a USB driver. :)
Changes:
Added labels: cantfix
State: closed

We should reopen this issue. I have an user who was using the voyager 44 braille display with NVDA. He replaced alvaw32.dll with this .dll. This approach worked until 2018.1 rc 1. Now his .dll does not work anymore. But it might help to understand how the driver works. Is it possible to continue the work on this?
ALVAW32 (2).Zip

The .dll attached above is from 04.12.2013

@Adriani90: How is the voyager connected to the user's system, using an ALVA converter card, directly using USB or serial?

It is connected through an ALVA converter Card.

Here is a try build that is likely to fix this issue.

@Adriani90: Could you please report in #6731 whether this fixes the issue?