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00:00:01
Braille Is Freedom with Bristol Braille's Ed Rogers
6 Plays3 days ago
On this episode of Hanselminutes, Scott talks with Ed Rogers of Bristol Braille Technology about the Canute project and the long road toward affordable multiline Braille. Most refreshable Braille displays show a single line at a time; Canute changes the experience by giving readers nine lines and 360 cells of spatial context. Ed shares how multiline Braille opens up new possibilities for reading, coding, math, music, diagrams, education, and independence and why Braille remains a vital technology for literacy, employment, and full participation in the digital world.
https://bristolbraille.org/
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
the idea that screen readers and I've seen, I think I've had a number of blind developers on the show and most of them have incredibly fast talking computer words. It's going in there. It's like five times 10 X speed and that's how they function.
00:00:14
Speaker
But I feel like if you were sitting at a Starbucks, it might be quite challenging. You can't really have situational awareness if you have someone yapping in your ear. yeah there there are There are limitations to what you can do with screen readers. that spelling Spelling, grammar, numeracy are much harder in most cases.
00:00:30
Speaker
And that's because a screen reader doesn't do something for a blind person that it could also do for a sighted person. So having something read to you in a computerized voice, if you are blind, it's not the equivalent experience of reading print if you're sighted. That's a great point. Like an audio book is not the same. Yeah, yeah. That's great point.
00:00:53
Speaker
But I should note, and you're right. Hi, I'm Scott Hanselman. This is another episode of Hansel Minutes. Today I have the pleasure of chatting with Ed Rogers. He's the founder and managing director of Bristol Braille. and He's here to talk to me about the Knute Console Premium, which is a fantastic new product that is open source for ah folks that want to use Braille to talk to their computers. How are you, sir?
00:01:16
Speaker
I'm very well, thank you, and thank you for having me on. So this is kind of a funny connection, but I think that for sighted people, we have seen in movies a one line, tiny Braille, single line of text. And we kind of assume that there's like sighted people who use computers the regular way.
00:01:35
Speaker
And then there's the Braille person that gets one line. It's very small and there's nothing in between. But certainly, you know, sight is a is a spectrum. And I was I was actually legally blind before I had my my LASIK and I relied on and still sometimes rely on zooming technology.
00:01:54
Speaker
How many people use Braille? Are they always completely profoundly blind or is there a spectrum within that space? I don't know exactly. It's very hard to get the figures of, uh, for around blindness in general, actually, but not least because everyone defines it slightly differently.
00:02:09
Speaker
Uh, for the legally blind is a different, is different to what makes you totally blind for one application and what makes you totally blind in the case of something else. So you might cannot never bother to read braille if you have pinprick vision where you means you can always read print, even though you definitely legally blind and wouldn't, wouldn't drive, for example.
00:02:32
Speaker
In Britain, the RNIB reckons it's somewhere over 20,000. So as as a country of 65,000 million people, you can probably scale that. There are countries like India where there are significantly higher rates of blindness because of certain diseases.
00:02:46
Speaker
and
00:02:48
Speaker
But when it comes to who reads Braille, there was a real worry about 15 years ago that the answer is less and less people read Braille, regardless of how many. It's just less than 10 ago, which was less than 20 years ago,
00:03:04
Speaker
which was less than twenty years ago and so on There was a figure I think the National Federation of the Blind in in in America had, which was that in the 50% of blind school children learned Braille, and now it's more like 1 in 10. Please don't quote me on those. that could That could be off by a decade or so. But it was...
00:03:28
Speaker
it certainly It certainly entered into a decline. And then there's been a lot of projects like ours taking technological solutions to that to try and patch up some of them the vast gaps in in what you can actually use Braille for. Because it's all very well saying, well, you but but we ought to ought to make Braille more available so that people can learn it. But you sure, but what do you then use it for in your real in in in your in your real life?
00:03:52
Speaker
And there have been lots of projects taking the more human approach, which is to encourage people to meet up and and learn and learn off each other, as opposed to learn from institutions and so on, which is certainly great. But that when suddenly the institution loses its funding or something, then the the community can just disappear, which happened over the pandemic in some cases.
00:04:13
Speaker
Is it feeling that this is largely screen reader technology that has caused Braille to fall off? The idea that screen readers and I've seen, I think I've had a number of blind developers on the show, and most of them have incredibly fast talking computer words. It's going in there. It's like five times 10x speed. And that's how they function.
00:04:33
Speaker
But I feel like if you were sitting at a Starbucks, it might be quite challenging. You can't really have situational awareness if you have someone yapping in your ear. yeah there there are There are limitations to what you can do with screen readers. that spelling Spelling, grammar, numeracy are much harder in most cases.
00:04:49
Speaker
and And that's because a screen reader doesn't do something for a blind person that it could also do for a sighted person. So reading having something read to you in a computerized voice, if you are blind, it's not...
00:05:01
Speaker
is not It's not the equivalent experience of reading print, if you're sighted. That's a great point. Like an audio book is not the same. Yeah, yeah, that's a great point. ah But I should note, and and you're right that it is, regardless of the point I'm about to make, which is ah actually technically theyre highly complimentary, but regardless of that, there is certainly a strong...
00:05:27
Speaker
there is certainly a lot of people who immediately respond by saying, surely technology and therefore text to speech has made Braille redundant. Not quite realizing often that Braille is a form of te technology. And in fact, a, a, an electromechanical form of technology where the, where you have a thousand pins moving up and down, um,
00:05:46
Speaker
ah with almost total accuracy is an extremely advanced form of technology. And and Braille itself is much is is is significantly younger than print. It is technology. But yeah, there is a there is a sense that other forms of digital technology have undermined Braille. And therefore, maybe we don't need to bother teaching it because it's a bit easier to just have something read to you.
00:06:09
Speaker
The question is, would you want your child to have the opportunity to to read print and therefore Braille ah or or just have them spoken to by a computer? So the point about it being complimentary is that in the modern world, it's not that much use having everything in paper.
00:06:25
Speaker
You need Braille displays, which is a rebuild, and Braille displays have to be fed by something. and has to be fed by a computer. And those are, unless you have a totally integrated device, we have some integrated devices, but unless you havere a totally integrated device, that takes a screen reader. So the screen reader speaks, but the screen reader also drives the Braille display. So the screen reader itself is what enables digital Braille.
00:06:46
Speaker
You know, as as you say that, it kind of immediately kind of becomes obvious to me, but it wasn't immediate. Obviously, just connected two things. You're absolutely right, because this the screen has a ah in in programming, we'd call it like a DOM, an object model that describes like a calculator yeah and the DOM has to decide if I'm going to present a calculator on the screen to a Braille display, what does someone want to see? Do they want to see a grid of one through nine organized in a square or do they want to see the numbers one through nine in a row?
00:07:15
Speaker
i could like It could be preference, it could be convention, who knows? The answer to that particular one, of course, has been until we invented the multiland Braille display, it had to be a line regardless of what it's supposed to be. But yes, it's it's so it's the same.
00:07:29
Speaker
The data is in this is in the same place and it needs to be served both through TTS and to a Braille display. And that is usually done with the same screen reader. ah that you you Some people might switch, but on going off on a ah ah screen reader tangent, because it is interesting, though there are different ways that that's done. And... um to use JAWS, NVDA and BRL DTY is three different examples. ah JAWS has been around for a while and and that's the commercial one. And that I believe, I'm not an expert in this stuff because it predates a lot of the more useful APIs on on systems like Windows. it it It would do a lot of work getting stuff off the video feed, whereas something like NVDA,
00:08:10
Speaker
relies very much on that DOM model and on the accessibility that is built into applications. And then you have BRL TTY, which is straightforwardly an evolution of of running from the command line. So it just reads text in the console and doesn't it it it doesn't require any accessibility features per se. It it shows you what's on the console.
00:08:30
Speaker
Okay, so let's reset for folks that are listening because a lot of folks are hearing this audibly and can't see you and can't see the yeah the Canute console premium behind you on your desk. So Braille is this is this writing system that blind and visually impaired folks use. It's sixth six dots.
00:08:46
Speaker
Each letter is six dots. It's three dots in two columns. So two columns of three dots each. what You're a sighted person. What caused you to feel like this is a problem that you are and your your group is is ready to solve?
00:08:59
Speaker
If you dwell on that for a minute, it's six dots and it represents the entire alphabet, every alphabet. Pretty much oh wow every alphabet in the world.
00:09:09
Speaker
ah There are some some cases where no one's got around to it yet, but you know there's Tibetan Braille as an example. Oh, wow. and music notation and and various other systems for computer science and for for for numbers-based work.
00:09:26
Speaker
And it's all the same six dots and it's all spaced a tenth an inch between each dot. It fits under the pad of your finger and it was invented by a 15-year-old French boy 200 years ago. Isn't that incredible? I mean, and it makes me want to learn it, actually.
00:09:39
Speaker
Exactly. And it's it's so ah brutally clean. There's no typeface. Well, there is somewhat a typeface in the sense that some countries like Japan uses a slightly smaller bale cell than some other the countries, but not meaningfully any typefaces.
00:09:54
Speaker
and everything is arranged in a grid. It's just got this austere beauty to it. And it was, the think, the first binary byte-based system ah because it's a six-bit byte. it's a six bit bite Numbers, for example, are represented with the first 10 letters, the alphabet, with a hash sign put in front of it. Or it's not literally a hash sign, but represented in text as a hash sign. And that's just very appealing. And then you put in the the challenge, the engineering challenge of, okay, but those have got to be dots that are a 20th of an inch high, perfectly rounded. They are a 10th of an inch between each dot.
00:10:33
Speaker
You need to have hundreds of those. In the case of the Canute canute Scientific behind me, you need to have 2,160 of those dots. They need to move up and down with reasonable speed and almost total accuracy 100,000 times.
00:10:49
Speaker
yeah So this is a fun engineering problem. It's a fun engineering problem. but it's And then you add on that that that people are being charged sometimes tens of thousands of dollars for this stuff. And you think, come on, surely there's something. The answer is there is a lot of somethings and they're all really hard to do.
00:11:06
Speaker
Historically, I have seen those one line, like 40 character, maybe 60, maybe 80, single lines. It's just a black strip. um and i and and and they And they move and they they they hop up and down.
00:11:18
Speaker
Are they all mechanical? Like there's lots of fascinating things happening in the haptic space, in the tactile space. Are you physically moving 360 refreshable pin cells up and down mechanically?
00:11:30
Speaker
Or are there new ways to think about how I could make a pip or a dot go up? and be felt and then go and then retract. They're all mechanical. I suppose yeah you're asking about deformation of a surface as a potential option. I guess that would be a way to look at it Yeah, the problem with that is that that is a much harder challenge than than mechanical because the deformation then would have to deform into a perfect rounded dot, at which point you might as well have a pin. And I assume people have an expectation.
00:11:59
Speaker
They have an expectation of what it should feel like. Yeah, you mean if and and if your manufacturing is... is but everyone's Everyone's manufacturing is slightly different. so ah Ours is is very hard. whale It's very and it somewhat sharp if you're if you press hard on it.
00:12:12
Speaker
A lot of people like it, but everyone's a slightly different. so The idea that it's possible to create a deformable surface which can... applies to braille is an unnerving idea it's probably not the best place to start okay i'm just kind of wondering if there's like an e-ink display for braille in the sense of like so l lcds have a purpose and and then e-ink came out and we as sighted people said oh this is delightful for reading is there some other thinking or or creativity around how one could deform a but Well, that if you if you go back to the pin technology, there are a number of different ways. And those ones you're talking about, which have been around since the 80s or something, that's a piezoelectric cell. So each one of those has a strip of, every every one of those dots has a strip or about four inches long, I think, of piezoelectric, which is a ceramic material when you pass a very high voltage a low current for it to be.
00:12:59
Speaker
It warps very slightly. It moves a pin up and down. It doesn't hold much. you know You can press it back down again. It's not got much force, but that works. It works very well. It's just that those piezoelectric strips are very expensive.
00:13:11
Speaker
Our technology actually doesn't have any pins at all. So we have 2,160 dots, but no pins at all. We only have 1,000 moving parts in the whole device because we use a series of octagons.
00:13:23
Speaker
and So we only have 100 motors in there, and two of those are vibration motors we don't actually tend to use. So 98 motors. So we use 720 you which you spin into new positions and the pin the pins are actually, well there are no pins, the dots are embossed around the outside of these octagons.
00:13:43
Speaker
and um we we We essentially remove the part of the braille display which causes the most cost, which is individually actuating six different dots for each cell.
00:13:54
Speaker
And we only have 98 actuators and a lot of little clockwork parts. And we build that in in Britain. In our own workshop, I'm here now, it's about 700 square feet and we build the world's most affordable Braille cell technology. It's about £12, that's what, $17 per Braille cell, which doesn't sound that little, but when you think how much it costs to build these and to ship them around.
00:14:17
Speaker
And we are, as I should emphasize, we're very small company. So we we're really the the minnow swimming swimming with sharks here. Yeah.
00:14:28
Speaker
So you're saying that a Braille workstation with one line might cost thousands of dollars. i mean, it might be like used car money and you've got nine times the data, nine times the lines and a screen. And you also have a screen. It's worth noting. You also have a high contrast 13 inch monitor because not everyone has full, you know, blindness. They may want that that top screen.
00:14:52
Speaker
Well, and also manure if whoever you are, you're going to work with a sighted person and All right, yes, touche. So on the Knute Scientific and on the Knute Console, before that, the Knute Console is a a modular design. that The Knute Scientific specific is the one that we're just releasing, and they're both they both are very they both face similar in their in their outlook. But the in the reason, the way we build them with the open source ethos and so on... but They both have a monitor, which, as you say, is 13 inches in high contrast, which synchronizes exactly the same data to the Braille display, which is different. So normally you have a Braille display, and and either that is being and is reading a corner of a visual screen, or it has no visual screen, and you can plug one in. But it's but you always get more data visually, or none at all, than you get in Braille. But we've designed something from scratch, which runs mostly in the command line, although you can open desktop applications now.
00:15:47
Speaker
which is designed to to make tables, charts, diagrams even, and of course, prose and programming and so on, have exactly the same layout. Because when we you were saying people are perhaps familiar with the sight of a single line braille display, those are great. They have been very important.
00:16:12
Speaker
Text is not actually a linear medium. it It has structure. ah especially Tables are the easiest way of describing that, of of persuading people of that, because tables obviously have structure. And if you if you only present tabular data horizontally, one line at a time, then that rather excludes all the possibilities that you might want that you might be looking at data which is vertical or at a as a diagonal. you know A lot of table data is presented diagonally, which is something you don't you're not going to get however you mess around with that data.
00:16:41
Speaker
But also just prose. Prose is not as linear as as um the TXT format would make you think. It's a how stuff lines up top over tail. It informs how we read stuff, how the headings interact with the rest of it.
00:16:57
Speaker
I mean, certainly a simplistic, but an example that just clicked for me would be poetry, which you might want to move a move forward and backwards within or explore a line and then move forward and then go, i want to look at that line again.
00:17:08
Speaker
Before, they would have to back up in their linear single line, and now they can just move their hands up a line. And very similarly, music sheet music, when you might have different you might have something for one hand on one line and another hand on the other line, and you might have the vocals underneath that. ah But of course, you can't if you don't have multiple lines. So we're really just so weve we we created our first display based off this technology. though wearing octagonal disks, if you like, which is very different and almost an entirely different category to normal-bell displays. We created that in 2019, 2020, and released it as an e-book reader, purely for the pleasure of reading. And then we moved into making workstations so that people can
00:17:48
Speaker
use the open source software that we've been building to solve their own problems and share that with other people. And problems being something like, i want to be an astrophysicist. I have all the talent and the enthusiasm for that, but I keep getting given these inaccessible things and I i need the tools to solve my own problems.
00:18:08
Speaker
And then I want to present it to my sighted colleagues in a way where we can both interact with it equally. that's where the Canute Scientific and the Canute Console before that came from. These disks, I want to make sure that I can visualize this and we can certainly go online and learn more about it. There's there's both the Canute Scientific and all the bristol main the Bristol Braille main site has all of this as well as videos explaining it. But is it like a die or a dice that is rotating or is it a disk in a single plane that is rotating in a circle? It's it's rotating in a single plane. So it's 80 octagons on one on one bar, one steel bar.
00:18:46
Speaker
And those are spun, and that gives you 40 characters, two octagons in a braille cell. If you think of a braille character, as you said, six dots in two columns, but that's actually two columns of three dots.
00:18:58
Speaker
Two, right four, eight. Eight possible pump combinations for each half a braille cell. Therefore, it fits around an octagon. That is very clever. That is very clever. And the thing that I think is really significant and I think that all my listeners cited or otherwise will appreciate is that it is delightfully repairable. Like you believe very strongly in the right to repair field replaceable parts. Like if you're blind and your thing breaks, you want to be able to get it fixed. You don't to have to ship it off.
00:19:24
Speaker
And wait six to eight weeks or longer for your lifeline to be repaired. It should be open source. It should be repairable. It shouldn't be a big giant company controls this and only one person knows how to fix it.
00:19:37
Speaker
Well, we released our first product, the Canute 360, very much undercon conventional in the conventional way that you do. It was a product, and if you need it, we we hope it won't break. But if it if if it does, we'll repair it for you. Don't worry about it. And it has a warranty. If it breaks after your warranty, in principle, that you'll have to come and get another one or pay us.
00:19:54
Speaker
hey yes In practice, what ended up happening was we just fixed everyone's machines because each of these machines took a very long time to build. And we sweat literal, literal blood and sweat tears and tears would go into this. And neith none neither of those three was an exaggeration.
00:20:12
Speaker
We wanted all these machines to work and people would say, I kept getting stuck in customs. I can't even get it back from from the Netherlands to to Britain. because and Can I possibly fix it here? I'm not.
00:20:24
Speaker
I mean, ah my my father's pretty good at this. if Him and I could work on it together. And we're like, all right, we'll send you our repair manual. So we never formalized that until the Canute Scientific came about. And we're going to really formalize it. We've redesigned the chassis so it can be taken apart. It is not a simple task. It's not something you should do for fun. This is not like one of those framework laptops where it's designed to be popped apart and change it up. It's like, think of it like a car. You spend a lot of money on this. You have the right to try and fix that. If your carburettor gets clogged up, you have the right to sort that thing out, even though it's not simple.
00:21:00
Speaker
This is has a thousand moving parts. It's not simple, but we have the right to do it and we will help you do that. And importantly, much like with cars where you have a where you have the most i a complex part is the is the engine and the engine ah in a modern car can run for 150,000 miles or more But people have to replace their cars far more often than that because all the electrics keep going wrong or go out of date and you know and all of this stuff. So I really dislike that. The Braille display is the expensive part of this, and it's the part which is hopefully unchanging.
00:21:34
Speaker
And what's not is the electronics underneath it, the Raspberry Pi 5, which controls that. We have ports on here, which are not only modular in the sense of we'll sell you a modular replacement in the future. no they're literally they're literally hubs, which you can unplug and buy another one off Amazon if you wanted to and stick that one on instead.
00:21:52
Speaker
So it's really as much as we can possibly make it, the person who owns it owns it. So you said a Raspberry Pi. So in the past, you would use embedded operating systems, you know but you're using open source hardware to make this happen. And have there been any challenges with that or did it just work?
00:22:09
Speaker
Actually, in the past, we used the Raspberry Pi 2. We've got two in here. We've got the Raspberry Pi Zero controlling the built-in operating system on the display itself. um and then And then we've got a Pi 5 on the scientific, which is for doing the applications. That's that's a hangover just because the Pi Zeroes are so fabulously cheap. They're a great way of building embedded systems.
00:22:31
Speaker
No, it's it's it's obviously, I say obviously, but to everyone that works with systems, it's easier to use an open system. it it It so continues to a mystery to me why people continue to use Android 8 or something as the basis of extremely expensive equipment. and then they And then you'd speak to the manufacturer about, can we upgrade this at some point? Like, oh, we're trying. We're trying. well why Why didn't you just use Debian?
00:22:57
Speaker
you know You're not running apps. Yeah. Yeah, we're just we're just running the Raspberry Pi version of Debian on this. There's problems, but none of the problems are to do with the operating system. That's the solved problem.
00:23:09
Speaker
People keep making it a problem by locking it down. If you don't lock it down, and the other the problem i think companies have is they feel like if they're open, someone's going to go and eat their supper. It's really hard building Braille displays. No one really wants to do it. No one's going to steal our stuff that that easily. And if anyone steals the Canute design and starts making it cheaper than us, we'll probably be their best customer. We'll badge it and sell it on again. you know it's It's better to be open on this stuff because when you are, you have a richer ecosystem which solves your problems faster from a purely personal, um selfish point of view.
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a positive and reasonable, like this is why technology is supposed to exist. It's such a reasonable perspective, like, oh, no, someone made our product 10 times cheaper and now more blind people get a great experience.
00:23:56
Speaker
Right. That would be fantastic. That would be, you know, you might be like, oh, shoot. Our little company is going to change, but more blind people get this available. Like I've mentioned before we started recording that i use an open source artificial pancreas. So I use open source software and we use commercial hardware and we're working on things like open source insulin pumps.
00:24:16
Speaker
And I'm always thinking to myself, man, I'm in the Northern hemisphere. I am so lucky to have these things available. And there's so many diabetics that don't have these. So from from your perspective, I can only assume that you're thinking,
00:24:28
Speaker
Every single blind person should have the option to have one of these in their lives. We just need to figure out how to get them made and get them to them if they want them. Yeah. mean, don't get me wrong. If someone steals our stuff, it would upset me deeply because that is upset them because they stole it. They could have just asked. Well, the principle of the thing, right? Yeah.
00:24:46
Speaker
But I am actually very proud that we build it as about as affordably as as it as it can be built, given the capital we have here in Britain. And you don't need to to try and find someone who will cut costs in order to build cheaper equipment. Sometimes when you're working with, I don't know...
00:25:04
Speaker
So paying someone a reasonable hourly rate of over 10 pounds or whatever, a living wage, is is going to is not the major problem that keeps the cost of complex equipment up. It's the support. It's the design of in designing it better.
00:25:22
Speaker
And a lot of that stuff can be ameliorated in other ways. Yeah, that's a great point. I'm curious also, I've been spending, I'm a coder, of course, and I spend a lot of time now doing coding with with LLMs and I use a lot of voice.
00:25:37
Speaker
And you mentioned that you a lot of blind folks work at a terminal, a terminal lends itself, of course, to a great experience. Have you had any feedback that and that a ah nine- row larger Braille display plus a coding LLM plus a terminal kind of changes the experience for blind developers?
00:25:54
Speaker
Because this feels like the perfect device for a blind developer. It's the console, which is the the sister product of this one that came before it. The console is a dock where we you dock the Braille, you dock a Braille e-reader, which I said was a product released in 2019 into this to make it into work, a workstation. Then we redesigned it to be more open, um literally openable in the sense of it can be dismantled. And then it became the scientific. The, the, the console was just so named because it was designed for developers working in the command line. And it is a really nice environment.
00:26:28
Speaker
It's a nicer environment for working with a LLM than it is for working the code that you wrote yourself, of course. But it's anything where you get to have the context of seeing seeing the of seeing the full function has obvious advantages. You don't have to build that model up in your head. And it is especially difficult with Python and Python.
00:26:50
Speaker
and languages which and insist upon certain forms of white space because you can't, that means you can't as a developer decide to strip all the white space out because it works better on your braille display. And then, or, you know, you can't get away with doing it your way as a braille reader that doesn't need indentation.
00:27:09
Speaker
It won't, it won't run. so Suddenly I started thinking about YAML on a braille display would be like the ultimate challenge. This application behind us, this yeah the this is the launcher menu, which is itself simply a YAML file, which is piped to hour one of our functions. So we've built a whole set of functions which enable someone to build applications just by writing YAML files. So you can write YAML file for a grid, for a for a grid for diagram, for a table, or for a... um
00:27:45
Speaker
a menu, of course, and and forms. I say a table, I don't think you do it for a table. but And of course, you you don't necessarily want to write your own YAML files. You might want to give you might want to pipe some CSV to that so you can generate the YAML from that. But...
00:27:59
Speaker
The idea is we want people to throw together solutions very quickly. And that's that's where we have to find our strength because we are a small organization. What we're hoping is we want to find mainstream partners who want to roll out x blind accessible maker spaces. that's our That's the reason we're calling it the scientific. I've got forty pin a 40 pin out here on the the side of this one because one we want to be plugging in sensors and oscilloscopes and robotic arms and so on.
00:28:29
Speaker
We 3D print many of the components and we've been working with the Cloverlook Center in Ohio to investigate letting 3D printing be more accessible. But that's what I'm really hoping for is to meet organizations who are mainstream in terms of they're not from our industry, but they want to experiment with making their spaces accessible and we can work together because there is a whole community of blind people who are already experimenting with this and can come work so fast if if given the tools and and the space to do it in
00:29:05
Speaker
How does the word get out? is it Is it word of mouth? Is it podcast? Is it YouTubes? Because if I feel like if I am blind, and I'd love to hear from read from listeners, and I heard about this, but i need this now.
00:29:17
Speaker
Like in my diabetes community, people hear about it by word of mouth. They go, oh, This is what I need. Or you remember that wheelchair that would go from four wheels to two and it would allow people in a wheelchair to like stand on their on their tippy toes because the or go upstairs. Like as soon as the word comes out about that, it's like, oh, I must have this in my life.
00:29:35
Speaker
Do people learn about about Bristol Braille and then just immediately reach out? Have you had amazing stories of andue enthusiastic people who are like, this is it. I need it. Yeah, we had a call yesterday at two in the morning local time for the person calling. It was perfectly reasonable. My time, he was just very enthused. He'd heard us on a podcast, and that was really great.
00:29:56
Speaker
and we we we had We talked, amongst other things, at great length about Nicky Lauda. But, you know, you go off on tangents. We won't go into the Nicky Lauda conversation right now. Formula One champion, for those who don't know. and now But, yeah, that...
00:30:11
Speaker
i But i hope whenever we talk about it, we i need to get around to telling you what the differences that are disadvantageous about technology as well. Because yeah like i hope that when people when we talk about it, it comes across very clearly that we aren't proposing that we're better than the other multi-line displays, which might be more expensive, but have their own features. We're proposing that we have a different philosophy based around empowering people to own their own technology.
00:30:35
Speaker
Even if sometimes the technology you own is kind of clunkier, chunkier, and it makes it makes a fun noise when it refreshes and so on and so forth. It is yours. And you could have afforded it.
00:30:46
Speaker
And that honesty does get us some people coming up and and just having very long conversations. And we then, if they buy, we build custom applications for each of those customers that buys into our premium, at least. And for someone who hasn't bought a premium, we certainly still listen to what they want and try and build it well as soon as we can.
00:31:06
Speaker
But the short answer to how most people find out this is events. So we it won't really be that surprising to know that Braille displays are something that you tend to want to touch ah to get to get a real feel for. So we we try and do as many events as we can.
00:31:23
Speaker
we do We do something like two two a month. Oh, wow. And when we can. But of course, that becomes that becomes difficult for a very small company when these events are all over the world. Yeah, indeed.
00:31:34
Speaker
You're sighted, but do I assume you read Braille, and what does that feel like? Well, you you can read Braille and you can see Braille. So you can read Braille visually. you can see it too. You're right.
00:31:45
Speaker
Yeah, and it will depend. For me, i i tend to do both because we reading is easier to get a vague idea for where to look right because i am because i so I'm highly sighted dependent, if you like, sight dependent.
00:32:04
Speaker
But it's very hard to pick out dot errors. So you use your finger to spot whether there's a mistake because, of course, one of the main purposes of me reading Braille is quality checking the devices and sending it back to have a rib ah replaced us. what We call ah column of bail. That's our that's our smallest module because the motor is a bit laggy or something like that. So that that you really have to rely on both sight and touch to do that.
00:32:30
Speaker
So that as a sighted person, it really depends on the on the the device you're reading. And ours is very easy to touch read whether you're sighted or not.
00:32:41
Speaker
And it also has been made hard because i literally ba the Braille dots are hard, which are normally they're much softer for on other devices because we worked a lot with people who were diabetic in our early years and that causes neuropathy, which means indeed you may have learnt Braille, but haven't really been getting on with it much these days because it's not quite as easy anymore.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, diabetes, the leading cause of blindness. And certainly the thing that is awful about it is that your fingers go numb as well. So yes, hard Braille would be far easier for a blind person who has become blind because of diabetes.
00:33:16
Speaker
Does your brain click and change in some way when you start, like when you're learning a quote unquote foreign language, you you do it, but you translate in your head and then at some point it clicks. So whether you're reading Braille sighted or whether you're feeling it,
00:33:29
Speaker
I'm just, it seems like, i mean, like Americans are very fascinated with like learning like American sign language. Like it's always a good idea to know a little bit of light sign language. I know there's BSL, there's ASL over here. Yeah.
00:33:41
Speaker
Is there, is there any value in in a sighted developer or a sighted person thinking about Braille? Because I want to I'm thinking out loud here, but you know, if a blind person and a sighted person are equally talented,
00:33:52
Speaker
What tooling is unfairly slowing the blind person down, the blind developer, the blind knowledge worker down? And what could I do as a sighted person to make tools that can interface with something like a Knut Scientific to eliminate that gap?
00:34:07
Speaker
Well, the second half of that first, then the second half was about the the gap. And that was on whether the data is inherently visual or not. Because if the data is inherently visual, then there is an inherent disadvantage if you're asking someone to look at a if you're asking someone to look at ah a JPEG of a family photo, there's a lot of detail. There's there's there's mountains that go down to ridiculously level of of grain in the background of that.
00:34:30
Speaker
There are means of doing that through tactile graphics, but they are not equal. They're not an equal experience. They're different. They're not necessarily worse, but they are much less detailed.
00:34:41
Speaker
Braille, though, is equal in the sense that someone can learn to read as fast as It's been measured ah in since people have done studies and the the the the the way that the data is um remembered, the sort of proactivity of of remembering it when you read with Braille or print is about the same and so on and so forth. So it is identical essentially for practical purposes. So if if your data is textual or numeric,
00:35:13
Speaker
The most important thing is not is is to is to note that actually underlying this it is textual and numeric data and not to make it unnecessarily to bake in some visuals.
00:35:24
Speaker
So if you're showing someone a chart, give them the underlying data so that they can read the data and possibly, if they have a commute scientific, generate their own chart from that data in a way that works for them. So that would be what I would say. I've forgotten the first part of that, though.
00:35:42
Speaker
Well, I think the how does one's brain click? Like I feel like when I when I did ASL, we taught our kids baby sign language. So when they're when the children can't speak for the first two or three years of their life, you can communicate with them quite effectively with sign language.
00:35:56
Speaker
And when you interact with a deaf customer, when I was doing, you know, working in a restaurant, I found that to be to be very helpful. I could see less useful reasons for me to know Braille.
00:36:07
Speaker
But you as a sighted person being able to know Braille, I'm wondering how that kind of clicked, if it activated the foreign language part of your brain or or what happened. It it doesn't because ah Braille is everywhere around the world.
00:36:20
Speaker
is in that language so it's a different code for the language the simplest way of saying is there's different alphabet for the same language it's not literally just a different alphabet because there are contractions in english braille but in many countries there are no contractions so contractions things like the word that is a single character so in many languages it really is just a different take on the alphabet so that you don't necessarily get that that click if you like but when it comes to learning the contractions or that sense of being able to feel the character under your finger. The fluency of information flowing into your fingers rather than into your eyes.
00:36:55
Speaker
Right. i have I have passed the first one sometimes and have since regressed. But the when you're picking up the when you're picking up the um the contractions, that is essentially the same as picking up shorthand in in in that kind of sense, if you if you can um imagine that. or Or in a sense, like learning a programming language, which is not the same as learning French, for example, but it's it's not a million miles away.
00:37:20
Speaker
I've never experienced, of course, becoming fluent in touch reading. ah it It does get harder the older you are. And at some point after your mid-20s, it takes more work. And if you're sighted, you have to be very dedicated to to develop the point where you're fluent. but But you can it can be observed that there is a point at which someone reads at the same speed in braille as they are reading as a sighted person reads visually and if you observe that it's clear they are not feeling they are not consciously checking the dots yes the dots are just happening and they might scoot the hand back and forth And they might use a different hat. So that is clearly a, the click has happened, if you like. And the click, yeah I would, it's not really my place to say, but I think that you would so therefore say that it is in the, is in the sensation rather than in the code itself, which is strictly speaking a language.
00:38:13
Speaker
Yeah. I think when the, when the Canute Scientific and Braille disappears and it just simply the information flows, that's when the, the, the, the blind person really is unlocked and unleashed and able to do everything that they want to do.
00:38:25
Speaker
a Yeah. So folks can learn more at BristolBraille.org. We'll include links in the show notes. The website is the primary place for folks to interact. If someone wants to partner with you, if someone wants to spend time with you, if they want to work with you on a makerspace or something like that, they can just reach out from the website.
00:38:43
Speaker
Yeah, and we've got we've we've got a US, UK and WhatsApp it's for getting in contact with or just email us. But you can also, if you check check our diary, because if we happen if we happen to be in a city sit near you, you might as well pop over.
00:38:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And then they can go and see the Canute Scientific pre-launch. ah There's an initial limited batch run happening, and then you can check out the shop and contact them. Thank you so much, Ed Rogers, for chatting with me today.
00:39:09
Speaker
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. This has been another episode of Hansel Minutes, and we'll see you again next week.