On Tuesday 15 November 2022, we hosted an incredibly informative panel discussion around writing software and working in the technology industry in general when using a braille display. We heard from people in a variety of different IT rolls about the techniques they use, when they use braille and when they use speech, and left ... Read more

We are delighted to be collaborating with Sight and Sound Technology for our inaugural online conference to mark World Braille Day. Find out more in this episode, and register for the conference here.

Find out all about the Braillists Foundation’s new Braille for Beginners On-Demand programme in this archive of the launch event which took place on Monday 10 October 2022.

In April 2022, our Chairman, Dave Williams, travelled to Boston Massachusetts in the US to run the Boston Marathon. While he was there, he took a trip to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown and recorded a tour of the facility where Perkins Braillers are manufactured.

The International Council on English Braille held its Mid-Term Executive Committee Meeting from 5-9 June 2022. As well as transacting various items of business, there were lively discussions around the history of braille, braille music, braille technology and the braille code itself. In this episode of Braillecast, we were joined by ICEB President Judy Dixon ... Read more

The annual CSUN Assistive Technology Conference took place in March in California, and there were lots of exciting braille and tactile graphics announcements. We assembled a line-up of braille-using panellists who attended the conference who talked us through what was announced and gave their first impressions of the new products they saw.

We know about braille in the UK, of course, and we regularly hear about braille in other developed English-speaking countries – the US, Australia, New Zealand and so on. But there are many other countries in the world about which we hear much less. How is braille taught? How is it produced? How easy is ... Read more

Freedom Scientific is perhaps best known for its popular JAWS screen reader, but it also manufactures the Focus line of refreshable braille displays. The first generation of these well-known units was released in the early 2000s, and now the fifth generation is available in 14, 40 and 80-cell configurations, with the 40-cell version being an ... Read more

For at least the past 30 years, blind people have been well-served by notetakers: electronic, computer-like devices with a Perkins-style keyboard and speech and braille output. At their most basic level, they’ve functioned as an electronic brailler for composing documents and, of course, taking notes, but they’ve also included functionality such as a calculator, address ... Read more

George Bernard Shaw, in his play Pygmalion, wrote that “the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.” That line has its roots in spoken language, though of course in English rather than Spanish! But what about written language? We quite often talk about braille being useful as a tool when learning languages, but María ... Read more