HumanWare has announced that their new Brailliant 40 braille display is ready to ship. Gilles Pepin, CEO of HumanWare said, “As a proud supporter of braille literacy, HumanWare is committed to developing products that help people who are blind to fully participate in the quickly evolving, mobile world around them.”
The new Brailliant BI 40 display has 40 braille cells and is compatible with JAWS 10 and later and Window Eyes 7.5.2, on Windows operating system computers. HumanWare plans to support other screen reader manufacturers such as Apple, Dolphin, NV Access as well. The compact design fits ergonomically in front of your laptop and includes an eight-key braille keyboard and thumb key controls.
We think the Brailliant BI 40 is a step in the right direction for price and portability, but at $2995 it is still out of reach for most consumers. We hope to see even bigger steps toward price reduction in the future.
Source: Humanware
I live in the UK and have just managed to obtain a Brailliant BI 40 through the government’s Access to Work scheme.
First, let me say that I’m disappointed with Humanware for not changing the name of this device in some way. I was looking around for a display early in the summer and I specifically wanted one with keyboard input. If someone hadn’t told me about the input keys on this new Brailliant I would never have even considered it because, as we all know, the Brailliant doesn’t have keyboard input, does it? I mentioned this to HW at the Sight Village show in the UK, as did many others, but they have taken no notice. It seems to me that, in functionality at least, this new device is more similar to a Braille Connect than a Brailliant, but so it goes. I hope HW don’t lose sales because of this strange and inexplicable oversight.
Now to the unit – I love it! It has both USB and Bluetooth connectivity and quotes a battery life of 25-30 hours with Bluetooth or 100 hours with USB. That would have to be unpowered USB though because it will charge from a USB connection if it can.
Your article above states, as does the Brailliant companion CD, that the BI is compatible with Window-Eyes 7.51. This may be true “out of the box” but I am running Window-Eyes 7.2 and I have obtained a couple of files from GW-Micro which have given me the ability to use my BI 40 with Window-Eyes 7.2 – thanks GW!
If anyone’s seen the Brailliant units you may remember that there are three command keys arranged vertically at either end of the braille display, rather like two halves of a braille cell. These were previously only used for display tasks, I believe, but now they can be used as extra input keys giving a total of nineteen or twenty keys to play with, depending on whether or not the unit can distinguish between the two spacebars or not. This gives a massive amount of key combinations and I am very hopeful that I will be able to control all the functions of my computer via Bluetooth without ever having to touch the computer again – no more hot legs!
Whoever manages to get hold of one of these units is in for a treat!