Hello there.

I should start this by saying most of my experience is with JAWS and NVDA on Windows. I know Voiceover quite well and have been using it daily for months now but I grew up in the Windows camp and it's what I'm used to.

So I have a Braille Display. It's a Focus 40 blue 5th gen. I got it through rehab for use in school. It's quite handy for writing down quick notes and reading non-literary content that speech engines and screen readers struggle with. It's very useful. I'm hooking it up to a 16-inch MacBook Pro. It's only the base model but it's still got tons of power and plenty of RAM for my needs.

In the day-to-day, I'm now almost entirely on my MacBook taking notes and doing homework at school or making videos in iMovie. I really like my MacBook and have learned many of the ins and outs and differences, quirks, and bugs of Mac OS and Voiceover. I'm a tech nerd at heart and make great effort to know my devices.

So I'm really frustrated with Braille on the Mac. At first glance it all seemed fine. There were key commands-galore, system and Liblouis translation tables, contracted and computer Braille, and other handy little features. But no matter what I try I just cannot get Braille to play nice.

Every time I try I'm plagued by a plethora of problems that combine to make it borderline unusable. I type words and everything goes down smooth until I speed up a little. A space gets transposed with the last letter in a word. A new line of Braille gets stuck on the same line that I was just working on, sometimes inserted into the middle of a word, and an empty line is sitting innocently below where my Braille should have gone. Eventually the connection just resets and suddenly anywhere from several words to a line or two of Braille is simply missing. Sometimes I get lucky and the MacBook catches up and inserts the last 20 words in rapid succession but that's rarer than my work simply poofing away. Maybe I can just slow down? Eventually the issues catch up even when I go slow. Besides, I can't afford to go slow when the professor is blazing through slides or the essay is due the next day.

I move up one line to review some text and only receive a blank display of Braille cells until I fidget around and move up and down a few lines and the problem fixes itself.

I'm not the fastest Brailler in the world. I shouldn't be having these problems. I've tweaked every setting, reset Voiceover, reset the display. I even wiped my drive and reinstalled Mac OS at one point. I've done sanity checks. My display is fine. NVDA handles Braille input and output over USB flawlessly. I can Braille to my heart's content. I plugged into USB on the Mac and got all the same problems. I hooked up to an iMac that had never seen my Braille Display before and got the same exact problems as my MacBook. I'm tearing my hair out trying to find out what the hell is wrong but no matter what I do I just cannot figure it out.

Applevis hasn't been much help and I'm at a loss here. I've ruled out hardware trouble or an isolated problem with my Mac. Is this just the way Braille works here? Am I doing something wrong? Should I be on an iPad or something? I'm out of ideas. So now I ask anyone here who knows anything about Braille and Voiceover for Mac. Please help.