News

Orbit Research are thrilled to announce additional distribution partners in the UK! Welcome Aspire Consultancy, Computer Room Services, and Sight and Sound to the Orbit Research family. These partnerships will expand our reach, ensuring that our innovative products bring accessibility and independence to even more people across the UK. Stay tuned for more updates and get ready to experience the best in assistive technology!

As has become customary, we will be taking a summer break to give our staff and volunteers time to rest and recuperate. Book Club on Thursday 25 July was the last event of term, and we will resume on Tuesday 3 September with Braille For Beginners.

There will be no online or face-to-face events during the break, and emails to [email protected] will not be answered until we return.

Orders for Braille For Beginners resources will continue to be processed, but at a slower rate.

We invite you to keep listening to our Braillecast podcast and contributing to our Braillists Forum.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone at the Braillists for their dedication and hard work, and we wish you a pleasant August.

Bristol Braille Innovation Centre, G11, 37 Philip St, Bristol, BS3 4EA, UK

Sight and Sound Technology, in collaboration with Bristol Braille Technology are delighted to invite you to this drop-in event which will allow attendees to get hands-on experience with the Canute Console.

• The Canute Console is the next generation in Braille technology. It builds upon the foundation of the Canute 360 Braille e-reader and takes it to new heights.
• Imagine a device that combines the functionality of an e-reader with the power of a Linux workstation. That’s precisely what the Canute Console offers.
• The Console consists of a Canute 360 Braille display docked in a workstation.

Specifications:

• Multiline Braille Display. The Canute 360 Braille display remains at the heart of the Console, providing a reliable and efficient way to read Braille content.
• Qwerty Keyboard. Pull out the Qwerty keyboard when you need to type or search. It’s perfect for professionals, students, and anyone who wants to engage with Braille in a more interactive way.
• High Contrast Monitor. The Console features a fold-up 13-inch high contrast monitor. Share what you’re reading with visual readers or comfortably explore Braille content.
• Smart Mode. Switch to Smart Mode, which runs in the Linux command line. In this mode, the Console becomes a versatile tool:
  • View and manipulate data.
  • Edit and write documents.
  • Transcribe to and from Braille.
  • Explore diagrams and maps.
  • And here’s the exciting part: It’s also the world’s first and only tactile videogaming platform!
• Reader Mode. If you prefer a traditional reading experience, use the Console in Reader Mode. Read comfortably while benefiting from the additional monitor and keyboard.

We can’t wait to see you in Bristol and show you why this is the most exciting thing to have happened to Braille in years!

If you are planning on attending, we would appreciate it very much if you would kindly complete this short registration form so that we can understand your specific interest or any requests you may have in advance of your visit.

For further information or if you have any questions, please contact Stuart Lawler at Sight and Sound Technology.
Telephone: 01604 344304.
Email: [email protected]

On Tuesday, July 30, at 7 p.m. eastern time, the Patron Engagement Section of the National Library Service in the US will launch a new monthly program called “That All May eRead” on Zoom. This program, occurring the last Tuesday night of each month, will focus on using the NLS Braille eReaders. Each session will begin with a brief demonstration of a feature or use case. The rest of the hour will be spent answering patron questions about any aspect of the Zoomax or HumanWare Braille eReaders.

You may access the program by going to: https://loc.zoomgov.com/j/1614539282?pwd=vVKnyVjiG8x91SGk7RN6lgxhb9XyLz.1

Remember that the meeting is recorded. Do not speak if you do not wish to be on the recording.

If you choose to dial in to the call, use the telephone numbers provided below. The Zoom.gov ID will not work with standard Zoom.us.

• +1-669-254-5252
• +1-646-828-7666

Meeting ID: 161 453 9282
Passcode: 776136

According to its website, “Tactile Reading and Graphics is a recurring international conference. It brings together participants worldwide that contribute to making information accessible through tactile solutions. In addition to braille, this also involves tactile graphics, drawings and 3D. During three days, the conference will feature a varied program about all aspects of tactile reading.

“The event is about sharing knowledge, ideas and experiences from practical work, innovation and research. The contributors will bring new knowledge and inspiration to the participants in their professional work and promote further development of new understanding within the field of tactile reading.”

Registration for the conference costs €635.25 (including 21% VAT) until Sunday 12 January 2025, after which the cost rises to €756.25 (including 21% VAT). Discounts are available for students and those who live in low and middle income countries. Register for Tactile Reading here.

If you would like to present at the conference, the Call for Abstracts is open until Friday 18 October 2024.

Do you need an easy way to identify your shampoo from your hair removal cream? Do you want to avoid accidentally feeding dog food to your dinner guests—again? Does your granddaughter complain that you’ve covered up the print label on her favourite midnight snack with your “special dots”?

Our sense of touch can give us much more information about our environment than we may think. Naturally, there’s braille, but how else can we use this powerful tactile sense to make things easier at home and further afield?

In this Masterclass, Matthew Horspool and Chantelle Griffiths join forces to take you on a tactile journey to help you master your sense of touch for the simple, yet powerful purpose of identification and marking.

You will learn:

• How everyday office stationery can save your sanity when travelling.
• How a simple rubber band can turn nightmare neighbours into amicable allies.
• How to use braille in fun and creative ways, even if you’re not yet a confident braillist.
• Why you need to own hair ties, even if you have no hair to tie.
• How texture and orientation work together to create a customisable system for identification that anyone can use.
• And so much more!

Whether you’re newer to sight loss or blind since birth, there’s something here for everyone. Join us to learn how to level up your tactile marking skills, and create unforgettable experiences for yourself and others, for all the right reasons.

Register for the online session here.

To join by phone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 821 0787 8790
• Passcode: 123456

HumanWare is excited to announce the release of their latest firmware update for the Brailliant BI X and Mantis braille displays. This update brings several enhancements to the Braille Editor, introduces new customization options for command keys, welcomes ODT file support and adds dynamic menus for a better online DAISY library experience. These improvements are designed to enhance your productivity, provide a more personalized reading experience, and ensure you have the tools to manage your braille documents effectively. Here’s what’s new:

New features in the braille editor:

The Braille Editor now presents your braille documents in a formatted way. This means better organization and a more readable structure, enhancing your reading and writing experience. This update allows you to prepare braille documents how you want, using your desired line and page length. At any time, you can always find your position with the “Where am I” shortcut, which will give the exact position of your cursor.

If that is not enough, a preview mode can be viewed, which shows format markets and allows you to proofread how your braille document will be embossed.

Click here to view the How to guide on using the Formatted Braille options

Click here to view the snapshot Video Tutorial

New customizable command keys feature for Brailliant BI 40X:

Users of the Brailliant BI 40X model can now customize their command keys. This allows for a more personalized and efficient interaction with your device, enhancing productivity and ease of use.

Click here to view the How to guide on how to customize your command keys

Click here to view the snapshot Video Tutorial

Dynamic menus add (applicable for Brailliant BI X and Chameleon):

We have included dynamic menus to support online DAISY libraries. This feature will enhance your experience when searching for and accessing your favorite books, providing more intuitive and streamlined navigation.

Click here for the full release notes

Dear All,

Sao Mai Centre for the Blind are thrilled to release Sao Mai Braille 24.7, featuring exciting new updates, improvements, and bug fixes, especially for math and music. SMB is not just a free Braille translation software solution but also a tool that enhances the learning and working experiences of blind individuals.

SMCB hopes you enjoy using SMB and would highly appreciate your help in spreading the word to others.

Please find the release announcement below.

Sao Mai Braille 24.7 Release Announcement

Highlights in the SMB 24.7 release include: adding 7 new braille translation tables for text (Serbian Cyrillic, Biblical Hebrew, Yiddish, Akkadian, Syriac, Ugaritic, and Transliterated Cuneiform); speaking mathematical expressions in Swedish and Italian; converting mathematical expressions to ASCIIMath, LaTeX, and Swedish Braille codes; reading music score in navigation mode (experimental), improving numerous Braille translation rules for large scores with complex notation, adding 3 new music transcription options, supporting to insert various new music file types when MuseScore is installed; and many other new features and improvements.

We have created a dedicated web page to post tutorial videos for Sao Mai Braille at: https://saomaicenter.org/en/blog/SMBVideos

Sections in the user guide are also referenced to related videos, which you can watch on our Youtube channel as well.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Mr. Hu Haipeng and the DAISY Music Braille project for sponsoring two months of development to fix issues and improve existing features of the Braille music translation.

Please Visit the main page of Sao Mai Braille to download!

The details about this release are:

General

• For Braille literature text translation, update to LibLouis 3.30: support new Braille translation tables for Serbian Cyrillic, Biblical Hebrew, Yiddish, Akkadian Borger and U.S systems, Syriac, Ugaritic, and Transliterated Cuneiform. Additionally, various improvements are made for Danish, Hungarian and Dutch tables.
• For mathematics, updated to MathCAT 0.6.3: support new languages for speech output in Italian and Swedish, and new Braille math codes in ASCIIMath, LaTeX and Swedish.
• Save Braille document in additional TXT file type.
• When running SMB with JAWS/NVDA for the first time, it will alert you to set the display’s scale layout to 100% if you experience the issue that the menus and dialogues are not read correctly.
• Re-enable all level X-Y styles up to level 11-11.
• Update missing Braille display Ascii code files.
• Improve navigation in the print dialogue in Braille documents.
• Fix issue of not responding when browsing by category in the math equation insert dialogue in some cases.
• When the “Check spelling as you type” option is enabled, screen readers report “misspell” if the typed word has an error.
• Alert when spell check is complete and close the dialogue.
• Fix the issue of not reading characters when moving left/right arrow keys in a table with Jaws.
• Screen readers should speak the cell’s content when navigating by Tab and Shift+Tab in a table.
• Fix “access violation” error when opening a BRF file and pressing Ctrl+P to print.
• Fix placing the table of contents in the wrong location when converting from print to Braille.

Music

• Music navigation mode (experimental feature): At the inserted score in the print document, press Shift+F5 or choose “Navigation mode” from the View menu to enable it. Then, use navigation keys to read the score with Braille and speech output.
  Press right/left arrow to move to next/previous note item, up/down to move to voice above/below, ctrl+right/left to move to next/previous measure, home/end to beginning/end of current page, pagedown/pageup to next/previous page, ctrl+home/end to top/bottom of score, and ctrl+g to specify the measure number and presss enter to go to it.
  Press Escape to return to the main editing window.
  Watch the tutorial video on how to read music score in navigation mode, or refer to the music section in the User Guide for more details.
• Support for inserting music scores with new file types (including MSCZ, MIDI and MEI). MuseScore software is used to convert these file types into MusicXML files, which are then translated into Braille by SMB. This file type conversion process between Musescore and SMB is carried out internally.
  It requires MuseScore to be installed on your computer. You must specify the path of the MuseScore executable file on the General Settings page in the Options dialog.
• Add the “multi-staff naming” option in the Staff tab page of the Score Info dialogue. By default, the Braille staff name is assigned automatically. Choose “Off” to not assign a name to the selected staff.
• In the Staff tab of the Score Info dialogue, improve the detection of hidden staves and list only the visible ones for customization.
• The “Stop doubling at the end of a parallel” option now works correctly.
• Improve handling of hidden rests in staves with multiple voices.
• Improve tuplet doubling.
• Move pedal and hairpin directions to the correct position when joining two voices for part in-accord.
• Fix the issue of not stating the print line number as having tempo text when translated in full score mode.
• Improve staff and hand detection. It will respect the originally assigned hand for a voice on a staff. It only changes to the other hand if the whole voice of a measure changes to a new staff.
• Improve measure rests on multiple staves in the same measure.
• Improve slurs starting from multiple voices but ending in the same voice on the same staff. They will all be treated as normal slurs.
• Fix the issue of missing long text direction when it appears with a metronome.
• Add an option to combine hidden voice containing notation of note properties . If checked, notational elements on hidden voices are ignored. Otherwise, hidden voices are written in full-measure in-accord. Find this option in “Multiple voices” group on music Braille’s Transcription page in Options dialogue.
• Improve tied-into and L.V. ties.
• Improve part in-accord and measure repeat: do not repeat one voice of a measure when the voice in the previous measure is in part in-accord mode.
• Improve part in-accord and part-measure repeat: only repeat when the repeated and original pieces are both in the combined voice or in the part-measure beat passage.
• Stating the octave sign at the first note of a measure is now based on the last note of a Braille measure, instead of checking with the last note of the same voice in the previous measure.
• The hand sign is now stated by checking its previous hand sign change in a Braille measure, rather than checking the changes in the same voice.
• Not stating supplemental accidentals when the note is written in the combined voice while the accidental change is in the previous part-measure in-accord.
• Add an option to apply repeat when matching both notated accidental mark and actual pitch. If not selected, it just checks for actual pitch regardless of the note notated with the accidental mark or not. Find this option in the Repetition group on music Braille’s transcription page in Options dialogue.
• Support detecting and applying custom Braille definitions for instrument changes: use the correct instrument name and abbreviation in both single-part and full score modes, use custom Braille name and abbreviation, and list in the instrument list for full score mode.
• Improve custom staff name defining functions: added an option to choose not to automatically name the staff. Auto-staff-naming is correct by adding alphabets of ABC etc., if the last Braille character of the part abbreviation is one of the Braille lower numbers: 1234567890.” Otherwise, it will be named as lower Braille numbers of 123456789.
• Add an option to show/hide note size. Supported detection of cue, grace-cue, large, and normal note sizes. For chords with mixed note sizes, the sign will be stated before the written or interval note, then following notes should be considered in the same size unless there’s a sign to indicate the change. Find this option in the Show/hide symbols list on the music Braille’s transcription page in Options dialogue.
• Showing hand changes doesn’t effect doubling and repeat anymore.
• Force to state key signature when it’s printed but it has the same value with the running one.
• Fix crashing and hanging issues, and many other minor improvements.

Do you need an easy way to identify your shampoo from your hair removal cream? Do you want to avoid accidentally feeding dog food to your dinner guests—again? Does your granddaughter complain that you’ve covered up the print label on her favourite midnight snack with your “special dots”?

Our sense of touch can give us much more information about our environment than we may think. Naturally, there’s braille, but how else can we use this powerful tactile sense to make things easier at home and further afield?

In this Masterclass, Matthew Horspool and Chantelle Griffiths join forces to take you on a tactile journey to help you master your sense of touch for the simple, yet powerful purpose of identification and marking.

You will learn:

• How everyday office stationery can save your sanity when travelling.
• How a simple rubber band can turn nightmare neighbours into amicable allies.
• How to use braille in fun and creative ways, even if you’re not yet a confident braillist.
• Why you need to own hair ties, even if you have no hair to tie.
• How texture and orientation work together to create a customisable system for identification that anyone can use.
• And so much more!

Whether you’re newer to sight loss or blind since birth, there’s something here for everyone. Join us to learn how to level up your tactile marking skills, and create unforgettable experiences for yourself and others, for all the right reasons.

The Masterclass will take place on Zoom on Tuesday 16 July at 7:30 PM. In addition, if you are attending Sight Village Central, join Matthew for a sneak preview, where you will be able to get hands on with some of the tools we will be discussing and take home a few things for you to try out during the online session.

The Sight Village session will take place on:

• Monday 8 July at 12:25 PM in room 2
• Tuesday 9 July at 1:45 PM in room 1

Register for the online session here.

To join by phone, please use these details:

• Phone number: 0131 460 1196
• Meeting ID: 821 0787 8790
• Passcode: 123456

“Is that a tin of peaches or a tin of soup? Someone did tell me, but I’ve forgotten!”

If this sounds like you, join us as we discuss and demonstrate low-cost, practical tactile systems to help you independently stay organised around the home. Whether you’ve lived alone for a long time, you’re adjusting to sight loss later in life, or you’ll be off to University in September, there’s something here for you. And who knows? You might even discover a new use for a hair tie!

If you are planning to attend our Masterclass next Tuesday, this session is a must for you! It will give you a head start on the topics we will be exploring at that session.

If you can’t make next week’s Masterclass, come and join us anyway! We will share some tips and tricks that you can use straight away.

More information about Sight Village Central

Book tickets for Sight Village Central