We have been covering the development of the Canute multi-line braille reader for a few years as it moves towards its anticipated release. Thankfully, as you will find below, the unit is now heading towards an initial production run with a launch for later this year. Ed Rogers, Managing Director of Bristol Braille Technology, and Dave Williams, Chair of the Braillists Foundation, look back at the Canute s journey to market and summarize some under the hood changes to the device that have occurred since we last spoke to the duo. J.J. also gathers some observations on Bristol Braill s recent win of the NBP Touch of Genius award and how it impacted their work in this critical launch phase of the project. To learn more about the release of the Canute, and to see information about launch partners, visit the Bristol Braille website
CSUN 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
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Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology book reviews and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind’s free monthly online technology magazine, www.afb.org/aw.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: CSUN 2019 in the Blind Bargains suite, and I am thrilled to once again welcome back Ed Rogers, who is the managing director of Bristol Braille – yes. The Canute. Dave Williams from the Braillists nonprofit, who is very much in support of this. The Canute, the multiline E reader in production. Welcome back, guys.
DAVE WILLIAMS: Hello. Good to be here. Thank you.
ED ROGERS: Thank you for having us.
JM: And that first voice – that’s going to be fun for our transcriber, because both of you kind of sound a little bit similar.
ER: I’ll put on an accent if you like.
JM: That’s Ed, and then there’s Dave laughing.
DW: Yeah.
JM: We’ve had both of you on before. We’ve talked about the Canute, but we might have some new listeners out there who might not be as familiar, so Dave, why don’t you go ahead and fill people in a little bit on what the Canute exactly is.
DW: Canute is a tabletop Braille eReader that displays Braille over nine lines. Each line has 40 Braille cells, and, of course, you can use standard Braille files that previously perhaps might have been used for hard-copy Braille production. So files that you’ve made in Duxbury or other Braille translation software can be displayed on Canute over these nine lines.
And the technology’s quite different from previous Braille Displays that some of us are familiar with, so not using piezoelectric Braille, so, you know, your single-line Braille Display where the dots can feel quite spongy at times. Canute is using a new technology based on rotors and motors, which provides firm, solid, hard Braille dots, so very crisp-feeling Braille.
And the unit itself, it’s kind of like a large laptop, I would say. And on the left-hand side, we’ve got a number of ports offering connectivity. Now, some of these ports are not live just yet. We’ve got a USB type B port at the back. That’s the kind of port that you would find on an embosser. And we would expect that in the future, that may work with your screen reader or your Braille translation software to send content directly to Canute. There are also two USB type A ports, one of which is for the library which is on your USB memory stick, the other is for peripherals such as a keyboard. And again, that particular capability is not quite live yet in software. But we’ve built in hardware platform that’s extendable and hopefully going to be robust for the future. In addition to that, there is an audio headphone jack. We’ve also got an SD memory card slot and an HDMI port to allow output to a display. So lots of connectivity there.
JM: What would you need an audio jack for?
DW: So it may be that in the future, you might synchronize audio with your Braille output. So, you know, the promise of things like Daisy, if you remember, J., going right back, you know, was that we would have synchronized audio and Braille content. And so Canute, as a platform, you know, potentially, could provide that in the future. And, you know, the hardware is there to do that.
So the software is open-source. The user interface is on GitHub so people can get involved with this. But right now, Canute works as a Braille eReader. Take your file from your computer, stick it on a USB stick, plug that into Canute, and you can read it, bookmark it, jump to a specific page, and, of course, that works great for multiline prose and text.
If you’re reading harry potter, for example, you can have that text flow onto multiple lines, you wouldn’t have to press a button after reading each line, so you could do that, you know, thing that we do when we read hard-copy Braille of moving your left hand down to the start of the next line without waiting for the refresh. You can also, of course, feel the shape of the paragraphs and centering and headings and all that, indentation, all that stuff.
But then, where Canute really shines, I think, is when it comes to tabulated content: Calendars, you know, word search, Braille music using multipart harmony or perhaps having the music notation along with the vocals, you know, the lyric. You could show all that at the same time when you have a multiline Braille device, which Canute is. So that’s why we’re really excited about, you know, what’s coming.
JM: Yes. In production. What does that mean, Ed?
ER: Right. Well, we’ve been developing this for years, as listeners will know. The Canute has gone through 14 or more prototypes, and we are now having the machines being manufactured in Wales, which is in the U.K. It’s being assembled right now. This is still early stages. We haven’t started selling them to the end users, but we’re having the machines produced in batches, we’re having them sent out to distributors in the very near future, in the next couple of weeks. So it’s very exciting for us.
JM: Speaking of exciting – and we’ll come back to the production in just a second, but I want to mention right off the top, you just got an award. Congratulations.
ER: Thank you very much. Yeah. We’re really thrilled. So we are the joint winners of the Touch of Genius award from the National Braille Press. And what we – it’s something we applied for years ago, and we know the National Braille Press very well and respect them a lot, and it’s been a huge honor. And I know – I know the people on the jury as well, and to be approved by the sort of people who are on that jury – well, it means quite a lot to us.
JM: It must validate all of the work that you put in years and years to be recognized by one of the top companies that deals with Braille in the world.
ER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I can’t think of a prize with an equivalent standing like this. It’s something that is quite important to the team because we’ve always made a really big point about the – we’re making a machine, we’re being very open with what we’re -- with people and showing them all our prototypes, and we’re showing them all the failures and all the successes and everything in between. And to get to the stage where we’re finally prepared to send this off to the Touch of Genius and to be validated for that is fantastic.
JM: So really good timing with the production starting, as you just mentioned –
ER: I know. And then, we actually had a machine we could send them for starters, which is important.
JM: So I’m guessing – you were telling me there has been a few changes since you brought the Canute by a year ago.
ER: Yeah. Well, since then, it’s all been under the hood stuff. It’s all been about increasing the accuracy, it’s been about making this thing more, well, manufactureable, you know? So a year ago, we came here with a machine which looked and felt very much the same. It was the same 40 cells by nine lines. It was the same, sort of, refresh mechanism. Of course, it has been for a few years now. But what we’ve done since then is we’ve been focusing on making this something that we can actually manufacture at an affordable price.
JM: So when it comes to all the experimentation and features that you’ve added, what has jumped out at you as some of the best-use cases for the Canute?
ER: When we started this stuff, we were very heavily concentrating on the literary aspect of this. And then, we – we’ve kind of evolved thinking that – since then, which is that we’ve come to realize that actually tables and mathematics and music are the sort of – the really strong suites for something which has got nine lines of Braille and is as affordable, or more affordable, than most Braille Displays, single-line Braille Displays.
And very recently, we’ve been experimenting with tactile graphics. And we’ve been developing a particular type of tactile graphic, which really, you need to try it to have it – to understand, but it’s about using all nine lines and the actual – the 360 cells we’ve got in the most efficient manner so that every single cell in the tactile graphic is encoded in as a Braille character which refers to a key. So you’re reading your Braille vector graphic, and you’ll receive Braille characters for every point on that line, and those letters in Braille refer to a key that describes exactly what you’re reading at that stage.
JM: So I remember last year when we were playing with this, it was mostly driven from loading files on, I believe it was an SD card or some sort of memory card.
ER: Uh-huh.
JM: Is that still how we’re doing things? Are there other ways to bring –
ER: That is –
JM: -- text on to the Canute, or –
ER: That is a design decision that we’ve made and stuck to. This is about – this is a machine where you put your BRF library in as a USB stick or an SD card, it’s a stand-alone reader, and then you read your high quality, pre-formatted Braille files, and they show up on the Canute as they would do as if they’ve been embossed.
JM: What’s the battery life looking like?
ER: Well, it’s a desktop device. So this does not –
JM: Ah.
ER: -- come with a battery built into it.
JM: That makes sense.
ER: Yeah.
JM: You could lift it, but you just, you know, you wouldn’t –
ER: You carry around – I mean, I’m carrying two around with me in CSUN, so, you know, it’s not –
JM: At the same time?
ER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JM: Wow.
ER: They’re not something that you would, sort of, carry in one hand as you’re walking around, but you put them in your rucksack, you take it out when you stop – that’s – the Canute is quite a large device simply because it’s got 40 cells by nine lines.
JM: Do you see it as a competitor to existing Braille Displays, or do you see this as a new market entirely?
ER: Primarily, as a new market. We see it, really, as – in fact, it’s almost closer to embossers than existing Braille Displays. Partly because it takes the same input in a sense, as it takes BRF files and PEF files. But because it does something that existing Braille Displays doesn’t do, which is that it keeps the formatting. It keeps the white space. And what existing Braille Displays do, the Canute isn’t trying to do. It’s not a notetaker, it doesn’t do on-the-fly translation -- transcription. This is a new class of device, yes.
JM: So if I wanted to bring a translated Braille document, my – would my best bet be to go into a Braille transcription program and have it do a 40-cell line, or will it do translation on the fly?
ER: Well, actually, if you’re a Duxbury user, the latest upgrade to Duxbury has got a Canute preset built into it.
JM: Oh wow.
ER: So we’ve been working with Duxbury. So you can go through and click through that, and it’ll do it for you. You don’t need to do anything. If you’ve got any BRF file or any Duxbury file, you turn Duxbury file into BRF. You don’t need to change your line settings or anything, it’ll work on the Canute straight away. If you wanted to make it so that it would work just so, so that it was perfectly designed for the Canute, you’d change your output so that it was nine lines per page. But you don’t need to do that. The Canute will work with whatever it’s chucked at as a BRF.
JM: Sure. It’ll kind of just keep scrolling as much as you want or –
ER: Yeah. It splits your page into three pages.
JM: That makes a lot of sense.
Now, you mentioned distributors. So do you have specific distributors lined up? Do you have pricing?
ER: Yeah. We had -- quite early on, early last year, the CNIB and the American Printing House and the NFB and the American Action Fund and also, of course, our U.K. partners, including Techno-Vision and many others around the world have been helping us look at the features of the Canute and improving them. And of course, now, we’re very pleased to be working with the National Braille Press, not least because of the Touch Genius award.
So we’re, like I said, we’ve gone into production, and these early units are going to our distributors over the next couple of weeks.
JM: So the time line –
ER: And those – the demos start around then, you know. That’s when the distributors start trying to get these units out to see what their customers think about them.
JM: And do you have a retail price in mind, or –
ER: We need to completely finalize that, but we’re looking at under 2 thousand dollars.
JM: Wow. Cost per Braille cell.
ER: Yeah. For 360. Yeah. Yeah. We still need to talk finally to our manufacturers on that one, but that’s what we feel confident about.
JM: Very cool. So, Dave, if people want to get more information, perhaps sign up, get notified when the Canute is actually available for purchase, what should they be doing?
DW: We want everyone to be involved in the Canute story, and you can do that by joining us at bristolbraille.co.uk. So if you go to bristolbraille.co.uk, you can find out more, you can join the newsletter, and find out when Canute is going to be available to you in your area.
JM: And Bristol’s spelled B-r-i-s-t-o-l?
ER: That’s right.
JM: Braille, dot, co, dot, UK.
Dave, Ed, thank you so much. Excited to finally see this come to fruition.
ER: Thank you.
DW: Thank you.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
