David.Andrews@f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (David Andrews) (05/16/91)
Index Number: 15695
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
I had an opportunity to try out the Mountbatten Brailler the
other day. It will be sold by HumanWare and costs $2595. There
are forward and reverse translators available at an extra cost.
The quality of the braille was pretty good. The keyboard was a
little different, the keys are at a slight angle from straight up
and down, and the backspace and line space are in different
places, although you can remap the keyboard. It is on the slow
side, 7 characters a second I think. You can braille and store
in memory, turning off the actual brailling. So, you could use
it for taking notes, and printing them later.
You can also hook up a regular keyboard. There are two ways to
correct mistakes, one immediately substitutes the new character,
which works pretty well. You can also just blank out a mistake,
creating an empty space. However, if you go back and braille a
character there, some of the old dots may come up again, so the
direct substitution method works better.
This would have been a more attractive device if it had come in
under $2000, but it didn't, so we shall see.
... David Andrews
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