Appendix A. Tips for Embossing Braille Files
This appendix provides tips for approving print requests and embossing braille files.
The auto-emboss setting in TDS automatically queues multiple print requests in advance as students progress through a test. If students testing with auto-emboss pause their test before you print all their queued requests, then when the students resume testing, they must send manual print requests for any unprinted questions that were previously in the queue.
Depending on how the prefetch settings have been configured for a test, you may be able to emboss all the items for a particular segment at once.
When approving print requests, you can either save a file to your computer and manually open it in the embossing software, or you can open it directly from the browser. The steps for saving and opening braille files depend on which browser you are using:
For Google Chrome users: The browser displays the downloaded file at the bottom of the screen (refer to Figure 1).
To open the file directly from the browser, double-click the downloaded file.
To save the file to your computer, click the up arrow icon beside the downloaded file and select Open.
For Firefox users: The browser opens a dialog window (refer to Figure 2).
To open the file directly from the browser, mark the Open with radio button and ensure that the appropriate embossing software is selected in the menu (DTB for BRF files; Tiger Designer or Tiger Viewer for PRN files). Then click OK.
To save the file to your computer, mark the Save File radio button and click OK.
For Edge users (version 44 and earlier): The browser displays the downloaded file in a dialog box at the bottom of the screen (see Figure 3).
To open the file directly from the browser, click Open.
To save the file to your computer, click Save.
For Edge users (Chromium version 79 and later): The browser shows the downloaded file in the lower-left corner of the screen (see Figure 4).
To open the file directly from the browser, click the blue Open File link.
To save the file to your computer, click the three-dot menu icon and select Show in folder. This will open File Explorer to the location where the file is saved in your downloads folder.
If you cannot find a downloaded braille file after approving a print request, you may need to modify your browser’s download settings (please contact your local IT support for assistance editing these settings).
It is highly recommended that you rename downloaded files to correspond with the question number listed on the Test Administrator Site’s Print Request window, so you can keep track of printouts when downloading multiple files at once. For example, Question 10 shown in Figure 5 would download with the name brf_enu_tds_bt_ecn, but you can simply add question 10 to the beginning of the file name so that it becomes item10_brf_enu_tds_bt_ecn.
Always plug the embosser into the same USB port used when it was first set up. Otherwise, the computer may identify the embosser as a new device and require you to set it up again.
If the Print button for a PRN file is grayed out in Tiger Designer or Tiger Viewer, you may need to convert the file in Tiger Designer before embossing it.
