Thursday, November 29, 2012

New Braille Input Apps Available

For some time now there has been no way to use the standard keyboard to input Braille via the 6-key Perkins Brailler system -- the previously available apps had never been upgraded for OS X or Intel machines.  This has now been remedied thanks to Ethervision's Pro and Student Braille Writer for Mac OS.

For the iPad the same company has Braille Pad.

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Myanmar/Burmese Bug in iOS 6

It's been reported in the Apple discussions, and I have verified it myself, that trying to view Unicode Myanmar/Burmese webpages, emails, etc. in iOS 6 can result in nasty freezes of the app being used, not always easy to recover from.  I'd recommend avoiding this script until Apple has a chance to fix the problem.

Note that iOS doesn't itself have a Myanmar font, so normally if you go to a site in this language you would only see squares, even if Safari did not freeze up.  But there are various apps that include a Unicode Myanmar font which let users read this language.

iOS 5 apparently did not have this problem (though I cannot test that any more).

I have seen a similar reports for the Khmer script and for the Thaana/Divehi script (used in the Maldives).

NOTE:  This bug was fixed with iOS 6.1 released Jan. 28, 2013.