Braillecast

Getting tactile diagrams at University is often not as easy as it should be. However, the Open University has an excellent reputation for accessibility, and has developed robust processes for students to request diagrams and for those diagrams to be designed and produced. This session was presented jointly by Jeff Bashton, former Visual Impairment Adviser at the Open University; and Andrew Whitehe...

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 met...

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 refresh...

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 Stree...

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...

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 t...

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.

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 Horspo...

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 readi...

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...

“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 Internat...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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....

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.

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...

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

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.

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...

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...

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 Kin...

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 als...