In our UKAAF webinar on World Braille Day, 4 January 2024, we celebrated the life and work of Louis Braille whose name is synonymous with the reading and writing system used by many people throughout the world.
There were three presentations given by Helen Wilson, Ed Rogers, and Stuart Lawler. As you can imagine, braille was the topic of the day.
Helen, both professionally, and personally, has a real passion for helping to enable creation of accessible documents and convinced these skills can be learned when at school.
She was lucky enough to speak with Sean Randall at New College, Worcester, who helped her to put together a ten-minute video about braille, and some of his firsthand experiences, and the benefits of braille in a digital age. He shared some useful facts that Helen is keen to make known more widely to educate people, but he’s also added some very powerful personal facts on how technology has enabled braille for him in our digital society.
Ed Rogers, who leads the work of Bristol Braille Technology, introduced new ways of using braille on the Canute Console, a multi-line braille display. He spoke about: Computer science; Data visualisation; Spatial navigation; Sport, representing positions of players etc; Video games; Tabular data, finance, and other uses of numbers in braille.
Stuart Lawler, from Sight and Sound Technology, demonstrated a new feature in the latest version of the screen reader JAWS, Split Braille. This gives braille display users new functionality, including the ability to view content from various locations on the same braille line. He also spoke about some applications useful in the classroom including Zoom, Teamviewer, and Screen Stream for sharing screen content using different devices.
