Bristol Braille Technology CIC recently released version 2.1 of the firmware for Canute 360 , the world's first multi-line braille E-reader. Canute has come up in conversation many times before, but never specifically: what is it, and what can it do? In this episode, we sit down with Ed Rogers, Managing Director of BBT, to find out. Links of interest: Specification for supplementary Canute BRF metadata file Information about Bristol Braille's braille music event on 13 April 2024...
Mar 18, 2024•37 min•Ep. 53
The braille community is buzzing about the next generation of braille display: multi-line devices which can show anything from tables to tactile graphics at the press of a button are now a reality, and enthusiastic early adopters around the world are putting the technology through its paces. These multi-line braille displays will, sooner or later, undoubtedly disrupt all our experiences of refreshable braille in many places, but perhaps most notably in education. What does this mean for teachers...
Mar 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 52
It's an exciting time for braille as we approach the 200th birthday of the braille code, and the International Council on English Braille will be celebrating in style this year with its eighth General Assembly , the theme of which is "Two Centuries of Braille". It will take place from Saturday 25 May to Thursday 30 May at The Grand Millennium Hotel Auckland , 71 Mayoral Drive, Corner Vincent Street, Auckland Central, New Zealand. But what is the International Council on English Braille, what is ...
Jan 08, 2024•33 min•Ep. 51
The Braillists Foundation held a face-to-face meeting at the 83rd annual convention of the National Federation of the Blind at the Hilton Americas-Houston hotel, Texas, in July 2023. Our Chairman, Dave Williams, was there with a microphone to soak up the atmosphere. We spoke to: Bristol Braille Technology CIC Hable A Cubed Design Ka Li (consulting for National Network for Equitable Library Service and member of the Australia and New Zealand Accessible Graphics Group (ANZAGG) and the EBraille Tac...
Jan 01, 2024•20 min•Ep. 50
As the days get shorter and the nights get colder, a few people joined us for a cosy fireside chat to round off the year on Tuesday 19 December. How do you write and address your Christmas cards? How do you know whose Christmas presents are whose? And what part does braille play in all of this? We were joined by our expert Braille for Beginners team, Mel Pritchard and Chantelle Griffiths, to get the conversation started, and we heard plenty of ideas from the audience too, on a multitude of Chris...
Dec 25, 2023•56 min
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could just pick up a tablet of sorts, draw on it, and have the drawing in a tactile form? And wouldn't it be even more wonderful if you could simply erase the drawing and start over if you didn't like it? The Braille Doodle does just that, and we catch up with the Touchpad Pro Foundation to find out more.
Oct 02, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 49
Have you ever downloaded a book from Bookshare or Reading Services, but struggled to extract the zip file? Have you ever had a BRF file emailed to you, but not been able to copy it to your braille display? Does your braille display only support text or BRF files, but you want to read Word or PDF files on it? If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, this episode is for you! Matthew Horspool was in the presenter’s chair on Tuesday 19 September 2023 and took us step by step through extrac...
Sep 25, 2023•59 min
Whether you're new to braille or an experienced braillist, reading is an important and fundamental process. To fully appreciate the brilliance of braille for use in daily life, reading is something you should enjoy and feel comfortable with. But what can you do to improve your reading skills once you have learned all the letters and perhaps some contractions as well? How can you enhance your reading speed and accuracy even if you've been doing braille for a while? On Tuesday 20 June 2023, Chante...
Jul 03, 2023•1 hr 21 min
The Orbit Reader range is now very extensive and comprises the Orbit Reader 20, the Orbit Reader 20 Plus and the Orbit Reader 40. On Tuesday 30 May 2023, James Bowden, Braille Technical Officer at RNIB, talked us through what these products can do, how they work, and the differences between Orbit Readers and other braille displays and notetakers. We learnt: The differences between the Orbit Reader 20, 20 Plus and 40 How Orbit technology differs from traditional braille display technology How to ...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 17 min
“This new braille has so many extra dots!” This is something we hear a lot, and it’s often followed by the question, “What do they all mean?” This Masterclass will help to solve the mystery. James Bowden, Braille Technical Officer at RNIB , Chairman of the Braille Coding Group of the UK Association for Accessible Formats , and the UK Representative to the Code Maintenance Committee of the International Council on English Braille , described the common indicators in UEB and gave some real world e...
May 22, 2023•52 min
Dave Williams, Chairman of the Braillists Foundation, and Ed Rogers from Bristol Braille Technology discuss the braille products to emerge from this year's event.
Apr 03, 2023•26 min•Ep. 48
There was a lot to cram into the last of our computer science-themed classes. We started with a quick refresher about what we’ve covered so far before taking a deep dive into what it takes to write software and build hardware with a particular focus on the accessibility elements of the process.
Mar 27, 2023•55 min
The final recording from the recent Six Dots to Success conference held in collaboration with Sight and Sound Technology Ltd . This episode features: Options in Education with Braille with Alannah Moriarty Panel discussion chaired by Roger Firman Summing up
Mar 20, 2023•55 min
The fourth of a series of recordings from the recent Six Dots to Success conference held in collaboration with Sight and Sound Technology Ltd . This episode features a recording of one of the breakout rooms.
Mar 13, 2023•42 min
The third of a series of recordings from the recent Six Dots to Success conference held in collaboration with Sight and Sound Technology Ltd . This episode features a recording of one of the breakout rooms.
Mar 06, 2023•43 min
Hable One is a powerful, fun and exciting way for you to interact with your smartphone or tablet using braille. As well as being a fully functional braille keyboard, supporting both grades 1 and 2, it also serves as a wireless remote control for every aspect of your smartphone or tablet, from moving around the screen to selecting, playing and pausing music, dialling numbers and changing settings. For beginner braillists, it is a uniquely satisfying way of putting your braille skills into practic...
Feb 27, 2023•1 hr 1 min
The second of a series of recordings from the recent Six Dots to Success conference held in collaboration with Sight and Sound Technology Ltd . This episode features a recording of one of the breakout rooms.
Feb 20, 2023•39 min
According to Wikipedia, Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes in any set of computer files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. Luckily for us it’s far more interesting than it sounds on paper as it was the topic of the third in our series of computer science masterclasses. We started off by cutting through some of the technobabble typically associated with tools such as this and then g...
Feb 13, 2023•54 min
The first of a series of recordings from the recent Six Dots to Success conference held in collaboration with Sight and Sound Technology Ltd . This episode includes: Welcome from Sight and Sound CEO Glenn Tookey Welcome from Braillists Chairman Dave Williams Keynote speech from Peter White, Disability Affairs Correspondent at the BBC Greater Independence with Braille: a video by Red Széll...
Feb 06, 2023•1 hr 6 min
This episode focusses on braille technology: its past, present and future. We are joined by historians, people working in the braille technology industry today and developers of the next generation of braille hardware and software.
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 47
Linux: it powers everything from laptops to toasters, braille displays to coasters. You may have heard of the world’s most popular operating system if you follow technology related news, but what is it and how do you get started exactly? In the second of our computer science themed Masterclasses, we explored how to get started using Linux with technologies that you’ll already be familiar with. We started by getting access to a test system to experiment with, then introduced everyone to a few bas...
Jan 23, 2023•59 min
The blind community is not without its fair share of innovators: Louis Braille himself, of course, alongside many others who brought us the braille code we know and love today. Elsewhere, the blind community has invented talking book players, screen readers, notetakers and so much more. For blind musicians, many of the most notable technological innovations in the past thirty years or so have come from Dancing Dots , makers of the Goodfeel braille music translator, Cake Talking scripts for the S...
Jan 16, 2023•50 min•Ep. 46
The Braillists Foundation recently held its first face-to-face event since the Coronavirus pandemic. In this episode, we catch up with some of the people who attended, and we also hear recordings of the three presentations which took place: Reading multilingual text using an iPhone, the Kindle app and a Focus 14 Text entry with an iPhone and a Brailliant BI40X Reading books with an iPhone, the Kindle app and an Orbit Reader 20
Jan 09, 2023•59 min•Ep. 45
George Bell has been at the helm of Techno-Vision Systems for at least 35 years. In that time, he has brought many blindness products to the UK market, repaired numerous machines which would have otherwise been condemned, and provided countless hours of technical support. He is particularly well-known for his involvement with the Duxbury Braille Translator, not only as UK sales and support but also through his tireless oversight of the documentation. He also enjoyed a very fruitful relationship ...
Jan 02, 2023•47 min•Ep. 44
In our last Masterclass before the Christmas break, we’re delighted that Kim Charlson, Executive Director of the Perkins Library (part of Perkins School for the Blind), was able to join us again. Kim is author of the book “Drawing with your Perkins Brailler”, which includes step-by-step directions for creating 36 different drawings including shapes, animals and subjects with holiday and transportation themes. In this session, she used Christmas-themed drawings to explain the concepts behind usin...
Dec 25, 2022•56 min
On Tuesday 15 November 2022, we hosted an incredibly informative panel discussion around writing software and working in the technology industry in general when using a braille display. We heard from people in a variety of different IT rolls about the techniques they use, when they use braille and when they use speech, and left plenty of time for audience questions.
Dec 19, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 43
We are delighted to be collaborating with Sight and Sound Technology for our inaugural online conference to mark World Braille Day. Find out more in this episode, and register for the conference here .
Dec 12, 2022•29 min•Ep. 42
Find out all about the Braillists Foundation's new Braille for Beginners On-Demand programme in this archive of the launch event which took place on Monday 10 October 2022.
Oct 17, 2022•59 min•Ep. 41
There are two well-known braille keyboards on the market today, the Orbit Writer and the Hable One. What are the similarities? What are the differences? Which one would suit your needs best? On Tuesday 4 October 2022, we were joined by a user of each keyboard. They told us more about how their preferred keyboard works and why they like it, and we learnt how they compare against each other. For further information please visit the Braillists Foundation Media Page ....
Oct 10, 2022•1 hr
In April 2022, our Chairman, Dave Williams, travelled to Boston Massachusetts in the US to run the Boston Marathon. While he was there, he took a trip to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown and recorded a tour of the facility where Perkins Braillers are manufactured.
Oct 03, 2022•56 min•Ep. 40
