Latest News
- Reminder: Sight Village Central
Don’t forget to come and see Chantelle, Matthew and others from the Braillists team at Sight Village Central on Monday (10:00 AM-4:00 PM) and Tuesday (9:30 AM-3:30 PM).
Further Information and Free Registration
Address: Eastside Rooms Conference Centre, Woodcock Street, Birmingham, B7 4BL
Braillists Stand: table 56, isle 5.
Other Exhibitors of Interest
- All Formats Transcription Services, for your braille transcription needs
- ClearVision Project, children’s books in simultaneous braille and print
- Dolphin Computer Access Ltd, developers of Easy Converter, which produces a wide variety of accessible formats including braille
- HumanWare, for the BrailleNote Touch Plus, Mantis Q40, Brailliant BI20X and BI40X, Monarch, and Tactile View software, Zychem products and Index and Enabling braille embossers
- jw.org, producers of braille resources for Jehovah’s Witnesses
- Professional Vision Services, distributors of the B.Book and B.Note from Eurobraille and the Braillex series from Papenmeier
- Sight and Sound Technology, for Focus braille displays, the BrailleSense 6 and 6 mini, Braille EMotion, QBraille XL, Orbit Slate 340 and 520, Canute 360 and Canute Console, Braille Doodle, Hable One, Paige Connect, TactiPad, Pictures IN A Flash and ViewPlus braille embossers
- Torch Trust, producers of braille resources for blind christians
- VisionAid Technologies Ltd, for the DotPad, Activator/Activator Pro and other products from Help Tech, Tactonom tactile graphics tablet, and the Logickeyboard Braille Keyboard
Seminars
- Tactile Tactics to Bolster your Braille, Seminar Room 1, Monday at 1:35 PM and Tuesday at 1:45 PM
- Celebrating 200 Years of Braille: Past, Present, and Future, Seminar Room 1, Monday at 2:15 PM and Tuesday at 9:45 AM
Braille and Beer
Hosted by Bristol Braille Technology at: Sacks of Potatoes, 10 Gosta Green, Birmingham B4 7ER (just a 4-minute walk from the Sight Village venue), Monday at 4:30 PM.
For more details on any of the above, visit our News page or check out last week’s Newsletter.
- Find Us With NaviLens!
Sight Village are excited to be trialling NaviLens codes in Birmingham this year!
NaviLens uses smart QR-style codes which can be scanned from a distance using a smartphone to receive instant, spoken information, making navigation easier and more independent. If this sounds familiar, you might have come across a NaviLens code on your Kellogg’s breakfast cereal.
Simply launch the NaviLens app and pan your phone around the room. As soon as a NaviLens code is detected, you will be given information about what it has detected, how far away it is and in what direction. As you move around, the direction and distance will automatically update to match your location.
A number of codes will be placed around the Sight Village venue by the event organisers, and we will additionally be displaying a NaviLens code at our stand.
We hope this will help you find your way around Sight Village more effectively. If you’re able to try it, please do let ourselves and the Sight Village team know what you think. Your feedback will help shape how the Braillists and Sight Village use this technology in the future.
Download NaviLens for free on the iOS App Store | Download NaviLens for free on the Google Play Store
- Braille Bar on Tuesday
Our popular Braille Bar returns this Tuesday at 7:30 PM. No question is too small, from kit to code – just ask and our experts will assist you!
Or, to join by phone, use these details:
- Phone number: 0131 460 1196
- Meeting ID: 880 3508 8878
- Passcode: 123456
- 20% Off Selected HIMS Products
To celebrate this year’s Sight Village Central exhibition, Sight and Sound Technology are excited to be bringing you exclusive limited-time-only discounts from their partners!
Always hugely popular, the HIMS range offers solutions for those in education or the workplace, ensuring that you can work or study efficiently and maximize your productivity with Braille.
Get 20% Off selected HIMS products: BrailleSense6, BrailleSense6 Mini, QBraille XL, Braille eMotion.
The discounted prices are available from Tuesday 1st July, in-person during the event, and for a limited time after the event online, and over the phone.
Discounts are only available directly from Sight and Sound Technology.
- Autumn Registration Now Open for Braille Courses at Adult Learning Lewisham
Registration is now open for the autumn term for the Braille And Tactile Skills courses at Adult Learning Lewisham, starting on 22 September2025.
The courses take place on Mondays either between 10AM/12PM or 1Pm/3PM. Terms are eleven weeks long and are held at the Brockley Rise centre in South East London: 2 Brockley Rise, SE23 1PR
No previous knowledge of Braille is required and many applicants receive free or discounted places depending on their means.
The group is friendly and supportive, and all learners work at their own pace towards their individual goals. There are lots of great group discussions about various topics related to visual impairment and things like tactile games are used to make learning fun and to foster new friendships and connections.
To register, please call: 02083143300 Monday to Friday between 9am and 4pm to make an appointment for a pre-course assessment with supported learning, or you can email: [email protected]
Pre-course assessments are taking place from the 1st until the 19th September and you will be required to attend the Brockley Rise centre with ID, proof of address and copies of benefit letters where appropriate.
- Upcoming Duxbury Price Increases
A message from Duxbury Systems:
Hello Duxbury customers and friends,
No one likes price increases. Accordingly, we at Duxbury have held the line for a long time now — since August 1, 2017, when our current price schedule was set. Unfortunately, to keep up with our increased costs since that date, we find it necessary to increase our prices at this time. New pricing, reflecting an increase of approximately 14.5% across the board, will take effect July 15, 2025. That leaves plenty of time to get orders in at current price levels. Also, the expiration dates on any quotations will of course be honored.
We look forward to continuing to serve the international braille community, as we have for the last 50 years!
– Joe Sullivan
President, Duxbury Systems, Inc.
“Software for braille since 1975”- Cutting Edge Meets Agility: New JAWS Version Coming Soon for Multi-Line Braille Displays
American Printing House – Thursday, May 22, 2025
Working together to create a new functionality of the JAWS screen reader program, Vispero, APH, and HumanWare are excited to announce an enhanced experience for users of multi-line braille displays, starting with Monarch. The beta version is set to release later this summer.
“For the first time in history, the Monarch offers a tactile array capable of displaying both braille characters and tactile graphics using equidistant pins, along with touch sensors for a user to route an editing cursor within multiple lines of text,” says APH’s Head of Global Technology and Innovation, Greg Stilson. “This partnership with HumanWare and Vispero brings JAWS to the multiline braille experiences for apps such as Excel, PowerPoint, Word and so much more. We’re just scratching the surface of what will be possible.”
Making PCs accessible to users who are blind or low vision for over three decades, JAWS screen reader reads aloud the text on the screen, allowing users to navigate and interact with applications and websites. This access to braille information helped users have a clearer picture of the content, including access to punctuation, spelling of text, and minimal spatial content. However, anything beyond one line on a braille display was read by panning forward and refreshing the content.
The vision for JAWS and multiline braille was to bring a spatial understanding of text and graphical information to a user’s fingertips in real-time. “Whether a user is browsing a file manager, navigating a spreadsheet, or browsing the web, we wanted them to have access to more information than ever before, while at the same time using different methods of getting the information they desire quickly from this larger collection of text and data,” says Stilson.
“Many blind or low vision people have their dreams about what features JAWS will support,” says Stilson. “We wanted to provide two initial, tangible features that Vispero is offering out of the gate: Wrapped Mode and Cropped Mode. These two elements will provide two clear ways for users to get information in a tactile fashion out of their JAWS screen reader.”
Historically, screen reader users navigated through tables with tabs without spatial understanding, but cropped mode allows for reading formatted tables with JAWS. Optimized for tables in Word, Google Docs, Excel, and tables on the web, Cropped Mode allows all table content to be aligned in correct table form. It spatially allows a user to navigate a table and see the full picture.
“My favorite feature initially is cropped mode as I think the way this vertically aligns table content will be a huge benefit for users to visualize data tables and other such structures,” says Stilson. “Blind or low vision users are used to seeing tables in a linear fashion, but this will be the first dynamic way a user can see both rows and columns at the same time.”
“I look forward to having multiline braille with JAWS on my multiline braille devices,” says Danielle Burton, Communications Accessibility Editor at APH. “Being able to see tables and spreadsheets tactilely would make interpreting and comprehending tabular data much easier.”
Wrapped mode optimizes the content to wrap around from line to line, ensuring no content is cut off, and optimizing the content for the available space, while Cropped Mode is optimized for vertical alignment. “This is specifically useful when viewing spreadsheets, tables, or any content that needs to be vertically aligned. All things that were never possible on a single line display,” says Stilson. Wrapped mode eliminates unnecessary empty space on the Monarch when reading documents and uses the same user experience that Monarch users are familiar with when reading a document in the Monarch’s word processor app. It optimizes the content for the 10 line by 32 cell display.
The goal is to provide all information from the Monarch to the screen readers so HumanWare can innovate with their respective software and the access to multiline braille features continues to grow and become more useful. “I see a world where blind or low vision people can see a tactile graphic of how their desktop is laid out,” says Stilson. “I see a world where formatting is respected and displayed, headings are centered, tables are aligned, and charts and graphics are simply available in logical ways. This results in blind or low vision people being interested in data science, architecture, art, computer science, etc.”
- Braille your Way, on your Terms: Introducing Braille Page-size Customization to Scribe for Documents!
Pneuma Solutions – Monday, June 16, 2025
You’ve no doubt been down this road before. You receive a brand-new assignment from the teacher at the last minute, with the need for a hardcopy Braille conversion near non-negotiable. Being the morning of, you haven’t the time to give it the once-over within your Braille translation software, since you already have to convert it from PDF to Word with another application beforehand anyhow. You do a quick conversion, run it through your smaller embosser at home, and rush it to the student for their first-hour class in which it’s needed and…what’s this? Parts of lines spilling over onto other lines? Oddly inconsistent page numbers? You take a quick look, reprint it on your large embosser and, just as you thought, the software had been set to fit the document to the wrong paper dimensions. But this really isn’t user error, particularly when dealing with a time-sensitive emergency such as this. Most traditional Braille translation software is great at what it does, but one of the things it was never truly designed to do is to handle a just-in-time Braille conversion gracefully. And while last-minute surprises are far from ideal, they are unfortunately inevitable, thus the need for a software package that will maximize simplicity while not at all compromising on quality.
Just-in-Time Braille Remediation, with Fine-tuning Made Easy!
Making documents accessible should be straight-forward and simple, the way a well-designed kitchen appliance is simple. With easy-access dials and buttons, a clear and logical user-experience flow, and help available when needed, Scribe’s workflow has been designed to make document conversion as easy as 1, 2, 3. As such, we are proud to bring this signature user-experience simplicity to Braille remediation!
When you convert an inaccessible document into Braille, you will be presented with some useful formatting options. In addition to the standard language and Braille translation table settings, the following controls are now available:
Cells-per-line: Not near your big production-grade embosser, but need Braille in a pinch? No problem! Set your paper width to a smaller value, and get instant peace of mind knowing that your student will be able to read the material without issue.
Page-Splitting: In situations where your document will benefit from hard-fast page rules, Scribe will now allow you to split the Braille file into pages. You can further choose how many lines should be on each page.
The End Result…
Ready-made Braille in minutes! Now that Scribe has saved you precious time by converting the document into Braille and taking care of the page-sizing for you, you can spend the time that you do have proofing the Braille for its content, rather than tangling with a complex beast of an application. In other words, Scribe allows you to work smarter, not harder. Why not take it for a test-drive today?!
- All Things Braille and More with Chantelle Griffiths
Chantelle gave this presentation to SPEVI NZ several weeks ago. Catch the recording here.
- At Your Fingertips: A Segment from the Unmute Podcast
The Unmute podcast periodically features a segment called At Your Fingertips, which focusses exclusively on braille. Here is a sample episode.
The Braillists is a grass-roots community group offering high quality training and support to emerging and established braille users. We also work with family members, friends, colleagues and teachers of braille users, and connect braille users with braille technology developers and funders.
What Is Braille?
Braille is a simple code for representing written language. We believe braille has the potential to transform the life of any blind person who has the opportunity to learn it.
Discover more about braille on this page.
Learn Braille
We support hundreds of adults to read braille by touch in a few short weeks through our innovative and approachable Braille for Beginners course. Free of charge, it comprises hard copy resources through the post and a series of short pre-recorded lessons, supplemented by email and Zoom support from highly qualified and experienced tutors.
Find out more about Braille for Beginners and register here.
There are plenty of other courses available too, for both children and adults, reading by touch or by sight. We have made a list of these on our Learn Braille page.
Perkins Repairs and Other Braille Equipment
The Perkins Brailler is the most established braille writer in use today, and even machines from the 1950s can still be serviced and repaired. We have compiled information about Perkins repairs, places to purchase Perkins Braillers, and other types of braille equipment on our Braille Equipment page.
If you are looking for braille paper, you can find it on our Braille Consumables page.
Our Aims
- Promote the value of braille as a proven literacy tool that enriches the lives of blind people.
- Support efforts to make affordable braille and tactile reading technologies available to all blind people irrespective of education and employment status.
- Provide an open forum for the exchange of ideas about the development of future braille technology.
Find Out More
Join our announcements only mailing list to receive our weekly newsletter.
Join the conversation and meet other Braillists on our discussion forum.
Connect with us on Twitter (@Braillists) or like us on Facebook for up to the minute Braillists news.
Listen to some braille-related audio on Soundcloud (braillists).
Please see our Sponsors and Partners for information on organisations who are supporting us.
Get In Touch
Email [email protected] or call 020 3893 3392. Further details on our Contact Us page.