[BlindMath] Braille Input with NVDA

[Matthew Horspool]

Hi all,
A very rusty mathematician here! Nice to be part of the list.
I'm supporting a high school student with NVDA and a braille display. We are based in the UK where the Student Annual edition of JAWS is not available, and the braille display cost them most of their budget for the year, so JAWS isn't an option even though we would like it to be.
Sticking with JAWS for a moment though: there is a really neat feature in JAWS where you can be in a Word document, press a keystroke and end up in a math editor. The QWERTY keystroke is JAWS key+space followed by shift+equals, and braille display keystrokes are usually implemented. You can use the braille keyboard of your braille display to type in this window in either UEB or Nemeth and, when you press enter, the braille is converted into a Microsoft Word equation.
We are looking for an equivalent option for NVDA. So far I have played with the MathCAT implementation in NVDA 2026.1 beta and it does a good job of outputting Word equations to a braille display correctly, but so far, the closest I've come to being able to input from a braille display is by brailing ASCII math and then using the context menu to switch that from Linear to Professional. The student is tech literate but not sold on math, so asking him to read math one way and write it another is not something we really want to suggest and to be honest, even if it's ultimately what we end up doing in this case, it's not a particularly good indictment for braille or NVDA and I think it's in our interest as a community to solve the problem properly.
With this in mind, does anyone know of an existing solution or any work which is already being done to produce one?
Thanks and best wishes,
Matthew