Technology

Denise is a Library of Congress--certified Braille transcriber. She's been doing it for years, dating back to before we were married (and in fact loaned me her Braille texts when I was briefly dating a blind woman before we got together). She can work with slate and stylus or Perkins Brailler (the equivalent of a manual typewriter, but with only six keys, plus space bar and return), but most of her big jobs use her computer embosser.

This is Juliet. She can run various widths of paper, can do one or two-sided Braille, and is a sturdy, noisy workhorse Denise has used for over a decade. And therein lies a problem.

Juliet has a parallel port and a serial port. Juliet has no USB.

This is Bright Spot. She is an extremely old MacBook laptop. I believe she's still running OS 8. Her battery doesn't hold much of a charge, thus she's tied to her charger cable, no longer portable, but she has a floppy drive, a serial port, and will run an early version of Duxbury Braille Translator.

To produce Braille with Juliet, Denise will first import text to the current version of Duxbury on her newish laptop (OS 10.13), translate to Braille, format, proof, and save to a USB thumb drive. Then she has to boot up my desktop Mac (OS 10.8, I think?), which can still copy to a floppy drive, transfer her files, and then go wake up Juliet and Bright Spot to make noise (and Braille).

This past month, she got her first Braille job in over two years (because global f***ing pandemic), imported the files, did the translation, struggled with the floppy (we discovered that OS 10.13 will read off a plug-in floppy drive fine, but doesn't want to write to it. Hence the extra step through my older desktop, which I keep around to run OS 9/Classic graphics software), but finally was ready to emboss.

And Bright Spot wouldn't start. We tried all the different 3-key resets--remember those?--finally hit the reboot point in the back, and discovered that she was starting, but the screen was so faint, even at maximum brightness, that we could barely see it. We had to close the blinds and turn out all the lights, so Denise was able to emboss the project. But this is clearly not sustainable. And God alone knows whether there are any Mac techs out there that can still fix such an old device, let alone whether they can get parts.

So I went online searching for solutions. Eventually found USB-to-Serial cables, ordered one. The software that came with it was heavily Windows-centric, and the one Mac driver was for an older OS, but I was able to get a current version from their website, although the promised documentation didn't seem to be included in the download. Download, install, plug in. And nothing happened.

So I went back to the internet looking for Printer Drivers. Apparently, the company that built Juliet, Enabling Technologies, has got out of the Braille business in favor of accessible vans, but I finally tracked down someone making open-source drivers for Enabling Braillers. Downloaded that, installed. And the Printer/Scanner Preference panel can't find it.

It's in there, in the folder with the other drivers--Canon, Epson, HP. I just can't make the technology talk to each other.

I need to take a break and do something I know I'm good at. Got a ton of clay in last week. Think I'll go throw some honey jars.