Hi Paul, That’s a problem. It’s quite a story, but I’ll tell you all I know. I have bootcamp installed and it went successfully on my mac mini late 2012. However, on a macbook air from a friend from 2013, it did not work at all. Yes you can boot Bryan’s DVD and you will get to a windows desktop soon where NVDA is running indeed, but you have no drivers, so that interaction with the system is impossible. There is no keyboard driver inside Bryan’s DVD, that supports your macbook air keyboard. Likewise, there is no compatible mouse driver so you cannot use the mouse. Likewise, the talking DVD does not have the macbook air sound driver as far as I’m aware, so you won’t hear anything from NVDA at all. I tried plugging in a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a USB sound system, but with no luck. If the talking windows installer DVD can be used on a macbook air at all, I hope we will hear how to work that thing, for on other systems, it is very usable and useful. What follows is my experience on my mac mini late 2012. If that’s not what you think can help you, by all means skip the rest.
You will go through these steps: 1. Get and burn Bryan’s dvd. 2. Go through the bootcamp assistant and at the reboot, turn off your mac. 3. Install windows using Bryan’s DVD. 4. Finish the rest of the installation, either with a sighted person or using fusion. Regarding step 1: Bryan’s DVD. I would advise you to use the large Bryan archive, as that contains a working installer for an entire windows 7 system. Once you have the iso image, have a capable program burn its contents on to a dvd. Then leave that DVD for a while. Regarding step 2: running bootcamp assistant. Before going ahead, first have a USB flash drive, stick or key ready, and format it as fat32. >From the utilities folder on your mac, run the bootcamp assistant. It will let >you perform these 3 tasks, and I would advise you to let it do all of them. A. Unfortunately, it will ask for a USB drive or USB stick, onto which bootcamp assistant will then copy the windows installation files. Just to satisfy the bootcamp assistand on the mac, you will have to let it do this, or you won’t get your bootcamp partition created afterwards. You won’t need this windows installer because we are going to use Bryan’s, but bootcamp wants you to go through this. Bootcamp assistant wants an iso file, or a physical DVD with an official windows installer, supposedly to proove that you indeed own one. It reads windows off of your dvd or iso file, and transfers those files over to the USB flash drive, which again, you don’t really need. b. Windows does not know how to listen to your keyboard on your mac, nor how to listen to the mouse, or how to send sound out through your mac speakers. For all kinds of hardware, windows drivers are required. Once you run the bootcamp assistant, you can enable a checkbox that lets it download the specific set of drivers for your very mac. Just check that box and let it do that, because once done, you will have a windows installation USB flash drive, that also has a directory on it for the bootcamp, i.e. mac hardware in windows drivers. And you need those after installing windows. You will also need nvda, so download that and put it on the USB flash drive for later. I would rename the official NVDA installer to NVDA.exe. c. Next, bootcamp installer will ask you how much space to allocate to windows on your hard drive. That space is taken away from OS 10. There is a slider that lets you devide your disk, and after each nudge of the slider, you move off of it, to read the labels telling you how much space is now set aside for windows. Then, the bootcamp assistand utility will reboot your mac. Normally, a sighted person would then continue the installation from the USB key, and then, after windows is installed, install the bootcamp drivers, to enable all mac hardware functions inside windows. However, for us that is a different matter. What I do when the reboot comes, is turn off the mac entirely, and then boot from Bryan’s DVD. If you have not seen Bryan’s dvd in action, here’s what it does. After you boot it, you will land on the windows 7 desktop. But this is a very minimal system. What’s great about it, is that NVDA is already running. You can do all sorts of things like inserting a USB drive, running programs from it etc. Besides, you will find the windows 7 installer right away through the computer icon, in xp that was my computer, so from there it’s easy, because you now have speech during the windows installation. But on a mac, it’s not that easy. On my mac mini where all went fine after all, I had no sound initially, after I started from Bryan’s DVD. So, I plugged in a pair of usb speakers and booted the dvd again. This time, still no sound. The USB external speakers are functioning, but with a volume of zero. So I attached my braille display, an Alva bc 640, which did not work either, initially. I then used NVDA plus f4 and enter, to stop NVDA. Then relaunch it. The NVDA key is your capslock key, so hit capslock plus f4. You won’t hear anything, but NVDA is asking whether to stop or not, and you have okay which is default, and cancel. Therefore, you hit enter and NVDA quits. To relaunch, hit windows key plus m, m as in Mike, to go to the desktop, then type nv to bring the cursor to the NVDA icon, and hit enter there. By the way, to the left of your spacebar you now have the windows key, and the one to the left of that is now your windows alt key. So now, NVDA is running again. If the driver for your braille display happens to be part of NVDA, then you’re in luck. I have a bc 640 from Alva, and Alva is the first braille display in nVDA’s list. So, after closing and relaunching NVDA, I opened NVDA’s preferences using the NVDA key plus n, n as in november. On a virtual windows machine inside fusion, I had previously rehursed the keystroke sequence to open NVDA’s braille preferences and select the display. To summarize, after hitting NVDA plus n, you have to go down and right a few times so you land on preferences, then right to open preferences, then 3 down to braille, then enter, and then I landed on the list of displays. Alva was the first at the top, so I hit up arrow a hundred times, exageration is a hobby sometimes, and then, knowing the cursor is on Alva, I hit enter to run the Okay button in the dialog. Immediately, I then had braille. Besides, because of the NVDA reinitialization,the USB speaker system did work, but with a volume of 0 as I said. I think that’s a bug somewhere. Thanks to my braille display, I could then go to the system tray and then crank up the windows volume there, and then I had speech from NVDA. Regarding step 3: installing windows itself. Basically, then you go into computer, where you see the windows drive list, you select the file system that contains the windows installation tool that is visible on Bryan’s DVD, and there you run it. Either 64 or 32-bit are on Bryan’s DVD. You can read all windows that the installer throws at you, until the reboot, where new problems arrive. One interesting thing I found, was that while choosing the drive to install windows on to, I saw a number of partitions I had no idea they existed on my system. There are EFI partitions, and other unknowns. However, if you label the newly created bootcamp partition beforehand, it’s easy to find it. Then, you just run through the installation process. A note on the bootcamp partition. The bootcamp utility formats it as fat32. If you want it to be NTFS from the beginning, just reformat the bootcamp partition from one of the first windows installer dialogs. Quick format as NTFS does it. As I said, then follow the instructions until the reboot. After the reboot though, the initial windows files will have been placed on your bootcamp partition, but you no longer have speech from NVDA because it’s no longer running. The mac will take its time and reboot one or 2 times later on, so just wait through that. However, the second part of the windows installation still requires interactivity from the user, which we cannot give it. So, What I did, was run VmWare Fusion, import the bootcamp partition, and then finished the installation from there. In bootcamp, you can have speech because fusion has sound drivers for your mac. Alternitively, you will probably need sighted assistance for this last bit, but it’s only a few screens. You simply hit next all the time, and then you adjust your time zone, windows updates, keyboard layout etc etc, later on. You do have to create your user account though, so you will want a sighted person or a screen reader inside fusion for this stage. Once windows is installed, you again will have USB sound, but no NVDA yet. Insert your USB flash drive, hit windows key plus r to open the run dialog and type: e:nvda and hit enter. Needless to say that you may have to try different drive letters, because you don’t exactly know to which letter your flash drive will be assigned. Follow NVDA’s prompts to get it installed. Lastly, install your bootcamp drivers from your USB flash drive and then do all your windows updates. There is a program called winclone, that I bought a license for. It lets you backup your entire bootcamp partition from within mac OS10, into 1 single file on OS10. There are other tools that can do the same thing, but I forgot their names. It’s a good idea to have a backup of your clean bootcamp partition with all updates already on it, in case you screw it up. You can also use snapshot.exe for windows backup and restore on bootcamp. That’s a tiny program for windows that you get from www.drivesnapshot.de <http://www.drivesnapshot.de/>. You run it from windows, it asks which drive to backup, and where to, for example you give it e:\bootcamp.sna. The .sna extension is for snapshots of entire drives, and these files are created by this snapshot.exe program. So you have a number of options to backup your new bootcamp. If things do go wrong, you have winclone from the mac side, or boot from BRyan’s DVD and then use snapshot.exe to restore your backup .sna file back to its original bootcamp partition. Hope that helps. Kind regards, Paul, from Holland. On 18 Nov 2015, at 21:53, Paul Sandoval <paulsandova...@gmail.com> wrote: > > i'm trying to install Windows 7 via Boot Camp. > I'm also attempting to use the talking windows installer. > If someone has experience using this installer, I could really use some > assistance. > I've listened to a podcast on Apple this, but I do not know what I'm missing. > I'm using a MacBook air mid 2013. > Thanks for any help you can give me. > Sent from Pablo's iPhone > > -- > The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries > list. > > If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if > you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or > moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. > > Your Mac Visionaries list moderator is Mark Taylor and your owner is Cara > Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com > > The archives for this list can be searched at: > http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries@googlegroups.com/ > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- The following information is important for all members of the Mac Visionaries list. 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