Tech Review / Constructive Feedback -- Focus (40) Blue, 5th Gen.

Several weeks ago, I received a new smart Refreshable Braille Display in the mail. It is a Focus 40 Blue, 5th-generation display. It is called Focus because it belongs to the long-existing Focus series of displays, or more specifically the Focus Blue family, designed and developed by the American-based company Freedom Scientific. They are called “blue” because they have the ability to be used via a bluetooth connection with a phone or computer and can be quite helpfully connected simultaneously across multiple devices, in addition to their USB connection. So you can use your phone or computer at the same time from across the room without too much fiddling around. Mine is specifically called 40 because it has 40 Braille cells that you can fit text output onto. It is the 5th edition of these models, the first of which I believe came out in 2009. In Australia you can purchase them from a re-seller such as Vision Australia and / or Quantum Reading Learning Vision (RLV), which is pretty much owned by VA anyway.

‘Review’ is probably a somewhat pathetic word to describe this post. But owing to some confusion that seems to exist in a number of places, coming from people who have purchased and are trying to use the display, I have endeavoured to compile at least a summary of some of the issues people are having with the Focus Blue, along with some hopefully helpful solutions. Mostly I have been a very happy Focus Blue display user for the last decade or so. This F40B 5th-Gen is a really good display and I do not intend to look anywhere else. But for some reason there seem to be some issues this time, perhaps partially with the display itself but mostly with things like the documentation, which is creating if only mostly minor problems for beginners in particular. It may be important to state that I am using the latest Focus 5 firmware as of this writing (5.81-61).

First and Formost: an Important Note on Online Documentation

One lesson I prematurely learnt the hard way, not having immediate access to either a built-in or external disk-drive, was that at least two 5th-gen user guides exist on the FS website. This one, on the FS support sub-domain, is up-to-date but this one, on the main website domain, which is the one that annoyingly always comes up in a Google search, is not! Users beware. Unfortunately, this discrepancy has probably caused me to ask some potentially stupid questionbbs to some people but that’s the way of it. One can check the FS Braille display documentation page. But There is no specific, immediately obvious reason, to my knowledge, as to why one should necessarily have assumed that there was a problem. Unless there is a really good reason for keeping the two user guides up on their website, it would probably be good if FS would either update the latter, or remove it altogether.

Also, it may be worth noting that there is a separate guide for the built-in Scratchpad, used for taking notes on the fly and transfering / exporting them to other applications such as a text editor or word processor.

Some Potentially Important Information Missing Even From the Newer User’s Guide

With the discovery of the new user docs, many of the formerly perceived documentation issues are not valid. But one that is still glaringly obvious is that I am pretty sure that the user’s guide contains absolutely no information on how to perform a factory reset. It probably should be contained in the diagnostics section. It’s not exactly like it’s a state secret or anything, so presumably it may be a simple oversight that FS may hopefully fix at some point. If you contact FS technical support, or a re-seller’s diagnostics team, they can give you the answer. I believe the command sequence is: while holding down the power button, press RightSelector+RightShift+LeftModeButton (the mode button being above the navigation] rockers. Unless the last button to use is actually the left panning button, that should be the sequence.

Internal English Computer Braille Table and Translation Issues

One of the things that some first-time users don’t seem to realise is that the Focus Blue 5th-Gen display, in its native / mostly autonomous mode, neither engages in any back-translation, nor even any forward-translation. So you can’t write easily readable print text into a text file without exporting from the Scratchpad to another device such as a PC; and even then you have to rely on the back-translational capability of the mediating screen-reader. I believe the Scratchpad saves text in Unicode, rather than ASCII plain text. But you have to pretty much write everything on the display as-is in computer Braille Code, which could be quite daunting if you are not sufficiently technologically literate and / or not an engineer, or a mathematician, or a scientist of some description. So even though you have the option of saving your files in the Scratchpad as plain text (.txt), the reality is that you are writing a raw Braille-formatted (BRF) file anyway. But ironically, the option to literalistically save a file onto the removable storage micro sd card as a .brf file is not available.

Consequently, on a similar note, even though I understand its functional capability, I do not understand the exact funcional necessity of the so-called .fnz file format, whatever that is supposed to stand for. Essentially, it is meant to be used for exporting back-translated notes onto another device via Bluetooth or USB. But considering that you can save as plain text &endash; and that doing so does not allow the production of coherently print-readable files but only raw Braille-formatted files – I’m not quite sure why the file format actually exists. Unless FS does not want the user to be able to figure it out, the documentation does not explain much about how how the FNZ files are encoded but the files are also not really protected, so you can still open them up in a standard text editor. I’m just not sure what the digits represent, whether they are convertible hexadecimal values, or something else. Would be really curious and interested to know if anyone has some answers. Unless you cannot export .txt files and backtranslate on-the-fly by this method? To be honest I have not yet specifically tested out this possibility.

Also, one final note: the Focus Blue has a duplicate Computer Braille issue with FS’ JAWS for Windows screen-reader, in that it does not know how to natively handle Braille dots-456. In JAWS, this problem has been around for quite a while. This is easy to fix with JAWS but not in the display itself. If you type dots 456 into the display, rather than encoding an underscore (_) into the text, it encodes the theoretically non-existent ASCII character 127 (the delete character), which is technically not even a genuine character and is not immediately recognised by JAWS. The only way around this is to try to consistently remember to simply type dots-4567 instead of dots-456, which always types an underscore properly and still ends up looking like dots-456 when reading text output on a PC, even when in a screen-reader is suppressing dots 7 and 8 to represent a classic Braille cell.

Smart Display Apps

One thing that confused me for a while (and I know that others have had similar queries) was how to toggle and then adjust the seconds display in the display’s built-in clock. I think it is as simple as saying that you cannot adjust the seconds but only the hours and minutes. You can only toggle the display or suppression of the seconds and have to just wait until the actual time gets to the relevant minute, setting the time accordingly, if one really wants to be that accurate which I suppose many people possibly could not care less.

USB and Bluetooth Connectivity Issues

Commentary from multiple people professionally working within assistive tech fields tell me that the only person to have these problems (especially the USB one) is reportedly only yours truly, even though the display has been around for a littl while now… Not sure what that means, if anything at all. Maybe the revelation is that my parents have lied to me all along and I was actually born on the 13th and not the 12th or something; but at least that was a half-lucky Tuesday and not a Friday. Anyway, I will outline the following two issues with the following two solutions:

USB Connectivity Issue:

On two separate occasions, Windows 10 has kicked up a fuss and displayed an alert notification, telling me that the display was not recognised properly and that the driver(s) could not be found or be installed properly. They actually did install but they must have become corrupted somehow.

I tried doing a windows update and repair but these did not work. Because Windows assumed at least the mere existence of the Focus 5 drivers, I had to do the following:

Bluetooth Issue:

A very helpful and knowledgeable individual informed me that sometimes the display stops working if you happen to have installed the Microsoft Narrator Braille display drivers, which I must have done at some point, perhaps because they are generally labeled in optional Windows features rather than being explicitly identified with narrator. But even after uninstalling them, sometimes there are still issues. To do this, I theoretically uninstalled the Focus 40 BT Bluetooth device driver as it was listed in device manager, although I don’t know that there is anything installed on top of the standard Microsoft Bluetooth platform. I also did a jaws repair and re-started the computer. I still had to remove the Focus 40 BT device (not the driver but the device which was apparently still paired with my computer somehow), then everything worked fine after re-pairing and connecting. I can’t remember the exact process though but it ultimately worked.

Conclusion

This is actually a really good display generally speaking; and I hope that my current post does not deter any potential FS / re-seller’s customer(s) from buying one. But if you want to be a proficient Braille consumer and communicator (reading and writing) then you may need to do some further investigation to be able to use this display properly. Hopefully this post makes this process less necessary, thanks to the help of some personal critical thinking skills, as well as good practical advice from many mailing lists, friends and acquaintances. Hopefully also FS will take some of this on board where required, based on some reports that have been made to tech support.