All About Access

Those of you who use the Duxbury braille translator are undoubtedly familiar with that age old question, a question far more weighty than such trivial matters as the meaning of life and what not: Will my keyboard let me six-key?

And you are probably also familiar with the theories about how to improve your six-keying odds:

• Buy a cheap keyboard
• Find an old keyboard

These theories are the result of years of experience, and are therefore certainly nothing to sneeze at—assuming you happen to be allergic to theories. But I have had more than a few old, cheap keyboards that wouldn’t six-key, and a couple of brand new, more costly ones that would. Go figure. The bottom line is that you don’t know until you try. And the problem with that is you can’t try until you get the keyboard hooked up to a computer where Duxbury is installed, right? Not necessarily, says Judi Cannon.

Judi is a Braille Services Specialist at the [Braille and Talking Book Library at the Perkins School for the Blind](http://www.perkins.org/area.php?id=11 “The home page of the Braille and Talking Book Library at Perkins”), and she just passed along a six-key compatibility test she received from [Duxbury Systems, Inc](http://www.duxburysystems.com “Visit Duxbury Systems, makers of the Duxbury braille translator”): Get into a simple word processor, like Notepad, and press the entire six-key set at once. If all of the individual letters show up, then that keyboard should allow you to six-key.

So I put one of my Logitech keyboards to the test. This keyboard has partial six-key support when I use the default key set FDSJKL. Things seem to work great for letters A through F, but fall apart at G. Here are the test results:

• A: Key F. Pressing an F gives me an F. (duh!).
• B: Keys FD. Pressing FD together results in an FD.
• C: Keys FJ. Pressing FJ together results in an FJ.
• D: Keys FJK. Pressed together: FJK
• E: Keys FK. Pressed together: FK
• F: Keys FDJ. Pressed together: FDJ

This seems to indicate that there is validity to the test. Each time I pressed a combination of keys that I knew worked when six-keying in Duxbury, all of the letters showed up in Notepad. But what about combinations of keys on my keyboard that fail in Duxbury, such as FDJK for G and FDK for H? Sure enough, when I press FDJK together I don’t get all four letters. Same thing when I try FDK. More proof that this test is valid.

One of the new features of Duxbury 10.5 is the ability to change the six-key set. Changing mine to EWQOP[ gave me the ability to six key. But what would the Six-Key Compatibility Test say? If I had tried EWQOP[ before buying my keyboard, would I have known that this alternative set was an option? I just tried in Notepad and the answer is a resounding YES! Very cool!!

This test is, of course, not as good as the keyboard box at the computer store saying “Great for braille production!” But it does mean that if you buy your keyboards from a store where try-before-you-buy is an option, you now have something you can try.

Thanks Judi!!!
—jd

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Braille, Other Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.