Express Activity 3: Exploring Applications on the Monarch

[adresselhaus]

Now that you’ve explored different applications share your thoughts in a discussion post.

Discussion Prompt:

Which application(s) did you explore? Describe your experience and what you learned. How do you see this application being used by students or clients in CIE settings? Think about how these tools improve independence, efficiency, or workplace readiness. What challenges might arise when introducing these applications? How would you help students or clients navigate these barriers?

Optional Extension:

If you’ve used other refreshable braille displays or screen readers, how does the Monarch’s application suite compare? Would you recommend it as a primary tool for students or professionals?

[Ronit_Mazzoni]

I have explored all apps on the monarch now, including the chess game. Given that the monarch can open PDF documents, I wish there was a dedicated PDF reader. That would make it a lot more professional seeming, rather than leaning toward the student market. Although the keyword application can open PDFs, it has to reformat the PDF to be readable. I’d like to be able to open the PDF (including password protected ones) more easily without having to open it in the word processor. It seems a bit redundant to have a keyBRF and KeyWord application, considering you can create BRF documents in either. The KeyBRF I know is more meant as a notetaker which is what I think I’d use most, but I’d personally rather have a word processor that can save as BRF as well as a separate PDF reader. I have also tried adding my work email to the KeyMail app but my workplace has not allowed the app yet, so I am not sure I will be able to access my work email as I was hoping to. I am able to access my personal email though which has been very smooth so far. In terms of what students or people seeking employment would want, I do think that a PDF reader would be wanted by professionals. Also, being able to read powerpoint slides would be a plus. I think the suite of applications currently available is perfect for a high school or college student.

[Jason_White]

I explored the Web browser, the book reader, the word processor and, briefly, the file manager. I wish to emphasize at the outset that the Monarch is a very impressive accomplishment in both hardware and software. To keep my comments focused, however, I shall concentrate on the limitations that I encountered. On the positive side, the applications mostly performed as documented.

Web Browsing

I retrieved and attempted to read a draft document which is under development by the W3C, and which was mostly written by a colleague in the Task Force that I co-facilitate. I was able to navigate by heading, but panning the display to read paragraphs of text proved unreliable, as much of the text would be skipped and the next heading would appear at the top of the display rather than a continuation of the current paragraph being read. I wrote steps to reproduce the issue and submitted a support case last week.

The browser is based on Chromium (excellent for standards support) and has the potential to allow students or professionals to interact with Web-based applications and Web sites on the Monarch. Thus it’s a highly valuable feature.

Book and Magazine Reading

Accessing my Bookshare subscription and reading a book in Victor Reader was easy. Then I discovered a problem. Most of the books I read include footnotes, endnotes, or citations and a bibliography. It is very desirable to be able to navigate quickly from a footnote or endnote number in the text to the corresponding note, and then return to the main text to continue reading. The same holds for citations associated with references in a bibliography.

The book I downloaded to the Monarch included endnotes. In Bookshare Web Reader, the note numbers are presented as links that lead to the endnote text, and there are links from the notes back to the main text. This suggests the markup in the book is correct. On the Monarch, however, using the point and click gesture in an attempt to navigate from a note number in the text to the note at the end of the book simply moved the cursor to the note number but did not navigate. Nothing in the User Guide suggests navigation to footnotes/endnotes has been implemented. I expect this to be an issue for, e.g., humanities students and law students at first-year university level or above, and possibly also for social science students. Professionals in research fields are also affected.

I also discovered that the magazine support isn’t designed for the task of searching for an article by title and reading it. While I could download issues of the magazine I wanted via an NFB Newsline subscription, there was no search functionality, and only the most recent two magazine issues were available, whereas the article I sought was in an earlier issue from last month.

Note also that the DAISY Consortium is currently developing requirements for accessible book/document reading applications, which address the navigational concerns. See pthis draft document](DAISY Reading Apps User Requirements) for details, and the list of open issues.

File Management

I’m accustomed to using the Linux or macOS command line interface for any file management task beyond the basics, so naturally, the file manager on the Monarch was going to be constraining. Nevertheless, it supports all of the basic functions one would expect. I noticed the lack of sorting operations (e.g., by last modification time, size, etc.) of the kind available in Linux, macOS and Windows file managers. Perhaps more importantly, it isn’t possible to access files over a network (e.g., using NFS, SMB, or cloud storage providers). I have worked in an environment in which files were expected to be saved directly to cloud storage and accessed on demand from whatever desktop or mobile device one happened to be using. Although one could use a Web interface for this, it’s additional work compared with having the storage mounted on the device one is using to read and edit documents.

The Monarch supports transfer of files from computers via USB, as documented in the User Guide, but my attempts to make this work have been unsuccessful so far. I can’t find the option to enable USB file transfer, which is supposed to be in Android Settings → Connected Devices. Online resources suggest that on Android devices, the option can appear in the notification area, but I couldn’t find it there either. It’s possible that my computer is at fault, as it’s rather old now and I don’t recall having used its USB-C port before. The newer machine is a MacBook Pro, which doesn’t support file transfer from Android devices by default, although installing Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) tools might solve this problem.

Text Editing and Word Processing

I appreciate the ease of use of the braille navigation and editing commands in the word processor, including the cursor routing function. I think the Monarch’s word processing features could be used for taking notes or writing simple documents, but they aren’t well equipped for writing a research paper, book chapter or graduate-level thesis. For instance, in my own work, automatic citation and bibliography generation has proven invaluable. Headings, footnotes and other document structures are a necessity, and the formatting guidelines of a journal, publisher or academic department need to be followed. I tend to write using a markup format such as LaTeX, Markdown or HTML rather than in a word processor, and this could technically be done on the Monarch, but it doesn’t support features such as markup syntax checking, automatic text indentation, shortcuts for inserting markup, heading navigation, and so on, all of which are very useful.

For those who prefer word processors, the Monarch doesn’t offer a style-based word processor, although there are basic formatting functions - perhaps sufficient for secondary school-level work, but not for undergraduate or graduate writing projects. In the sciences, of course, inline and displayed equations, figures and tables are all essential features.

On the other hand, this word processor should be excellent for taking notes at a meeting, reading a handout at a seminar, or other tasks not involving complex document creation.

Additional Opportunities and Challenges

Obviously, the availability of a terminal mode on the Monarch will overcome the limitations noted above by allowing for the use of any desired application running on another device with a supported screen reader. However, taking both the Monarch and a laptop computer to different meetings, classes, etc., is bound to be inconvenient. If the functionality of an Android screen reader (using system accessibility APIs) were reliably available on the Monarch, it would then be possible to use a variety of accessible Android applications not specifically written for this device. I think such an approach would also help to overcome limitations of the custom-written applications by enabling more fully featured alternatives to be used on the Monarch itself, complementing the custom tools. The general shift toward Web applications in the workplace should also help.

Comparison

This is the well known problem of braille notetakers and similar products: with the specialized applications on these devices, you have the advantages of a user interface designed specifically for braille-based interaction, but you then lose much of the functionality typical of desktop operating systems and applications. Using a screen reader with a mobile or desktop operating system provides the desired application features, but the user interface isn’t optimized for a braille device. A small and dedicated group of software developers can’t possibly implement even a significant subset of the features that would be desirable in specialized applications. So I think a strategic approach will be needed in deciding what to support in specialized applications and how best to enable engagement with the wider world of Android applications and with screen readers running on other devices.

The Monarch’s custom applications are better than any I have used on other braille displays, by a wide margin. The Monarch is among a handful of devices at the forefront of braille technology today. Nothing I’ve written here should detract from an appreciation of how amazing this is.

[Deborah_Armstrong]

I agree with Ronit about the need for a professional PDF reader, especially ability to cope with password protected ones. Publishers tend to deliver eBook versions of their textbooks in PDFS which often have underlying text but can be semi-accessible. This is true whether it’s sold in the college bookstore as an eBook or acquired through disabled student services from the publisher.
PDF eBooks often have bookmarks and links, so the reader would need to be able to navigate with these, for example, enabling the student to go directly to chapter 5.
Another PDF issue which is also true for screen readers is that professors often assign pages to read and the poor student cannot easily locate them in the PDF. “Turn to page 254 then respond to the questions on page 339” is a typical in-class assignment.
Also I agree about the need to be able to read PowerPoint. Like Jason said though, if there’s a terminal mode, maybe college students will simply use Word, or PowerPoint or Outlook and not really bother with the built-in applications.
I agree with Jason that navigation in the web browser is a bit shaky, especially with longer pages and in-page links.
And I agree that links in bookshare books are not working. However, with the FS Reader and JAWS, the same thing occurs; you cannot jump to a footnote or an item in a book’s table of contents in a Daisy book with that tool either. Using an Epub reader on my PC I did have better results, so since the Monarch does support epub, navigating to links within a book should be easily possible.
The limitation of NFB Newsline only giving you the most recent articles is built in to Newsline itself, and probably cannot be changed by the Monarch. My solution is to set my subscription on my other devices to not expire old issues, and every few days I copy all the newsline content off my device to an archive drive. This way I can sort of find older articles, but I doubt the Monarch will ever be able to make this possible. Libraries’ databases are still the best source for finding older magazine and newspaper articles.
I was able to use MTP USB transfer to easily move files from my PC to the Monarch unlike Jason. But I have Windows 11 and several obsolete android phones that I practiced with first. My Fire tablet is equally finicky about file transfer, so it wasn’t my first rodeo. The big problem I have with the file manager is that it insists on copying all these empty Android folders on to a USB flash drive when you transfer files to and from a flash drive, as described in a previous post. Trying to figure out where you are in the file structure is confusing too; in a previous post, I suggested having the pathname always appear as the first line on the display.
The file manager on the Brailliant and NLS eReader, also made by Humanware is much easier to use I think and its interface should be copied, except of course for adding pathnames since there is more screen real estate to work with.
The file manager should also take care of importing any file in to Victor Reader if that’s the app you want to use with a file. There’s no reason to make the user interface less friendly by requiring an extra step for the user.
Regarding Jason’s comments that cloud storage should be supported is another reason for users to have direct access to Android apps. I have apps to do ssh, ftp, NFS, rsync, samba, etc. And of course google provides a google drive app, Microsoft a one-drive app, dropbox its own app … in college, professors do put files on the cloud for students to grab, and every professor has his own idea about which cloud storage he prefers.
I agree with Jason that the word processor is too simple for higher education requirements, but if a student cannot use a computer in college, then they aren’t going to succeed anyway these days. Many of my competent academic students, both those who are blind and those with learning disabilities prepare their first drafts on their phones or tablets, using either iOS or Android apps. Then they complete the formatting on a PC or Mac using Microsoft Word or Apple Pages. So I don’t see that having a simple word processor is truly a problem. I prepared minutes for several meetings this week in KeyWord, moved them to my PC where I cleaned up the formatting, put the tresurers’ report in to a nicely formatted table and it was all good.
Regarding having one editor for both simple note-taking and Word processing, that was what was done on the VarioUltra. It could easily translate between Braille and print though it didn’t have as many features as the Monarch or other Humanware devices’ keyword does. But one really good use for having KeyBRF is the ability to write Braille that cannot be translated, such as Grade 3, music notation, passages in another language intermingled with the primary language or your own personal shorthand.
For example, I’m working through a book on intermediate level Spanish and if I take notes some are in English and some in Spanish. So that I would do these notes in KeyBRF and not KeyWord, because if translated to print it will look like nonsense. For those reading this who do not know Braille, yes there are Spanish tables, but if you are working with multiple languages, you cannot switch tables mid-document with a simple editor.
Regarding Jason’s comment about running Android apps on the device, I agree. I wonder if I’d crash it if I tried side-loading apps. I do that on my Fire tablet all the time and it works fine, but I think this may be too special-purpose. It’s a pity, since education has loads of apps, and of course not all are accessible, but some definitely are.
I still need to try google docs in the browser since it is used extensively in education for all levels and also try filling out some forms. I’ll report on that when I do.
Jason writes:

This is the well known problem of braille notetakers and similar products:…
and I cannot agree more. I encourage my blind students to continue to use their Braille note-takers for just that, taking notes, reading books, but they must learn to use a computer. Specialized apps take you only so far, and regarding CIE, nobody will hire you if you cannot use a computer. Perhaps in a low-level customer service job you could get away with using a specialized device, but you could not get promoted if you had limited skill using a PC or Mac. Of course when you use a Braille device you can be more efficient with certain tasks, which is why they have value.
One workplace trend I’m struggling now with is the tendency during zoom meetings for attendees to collaborate in realtime using google suite or Office on the web. This occurs even if none of us are working remotely. It’s more accessible than everyone collaborating on a whiteboard but not by much. Unfortunately, my co-workers see it as accessible since I am a confident user of Office on the desktop so they don’t understand why I’m struggling.
I know this may not seem Monarch related but ideally, the Monarch could speed my ability to function in these situations. I’m in a meeting and someone pulls up a document and wants everyone to add comments and it’s a huge table. I spend half the meeting just trying to figure out where my comment is supposed to go. I am trying to listen to both my screen reader and people speaking in the meeting and panning frantically on my single line display to find where in this huge table I’m supposed to insert my thoughts. And if I press Tab in the wrong place, I’m now indenting a paragraph instead of navigating to a cell.
It’s even worse with Excel or Google sheets: the boss pops up a spreadsheet and wants us to all enter some data right now in the meeting! I’ve been asked multiple times if I have a learning disability, when it’s my technology that has a learning disability-- not me!
I also want to say that Keymath makes it very easy to keep track of a long list of calculations, something much harder to do in Excel with a screen reader. Though the “Mastering the Monarch” course demoed using it for graphing, which is valuable for students, in an employment situation where you must often calculate rapidly in real-time, it’s superb. Imagine giving a customer a price estimate on a complex wishlist for example, or totaling up expenses for a trip the boss is taking.
I want to explore the web browser more, looking at a variety of pages and web-based apps and online learning platforms. I also want to play with the chess app which I have not yet done.

[Jason_White]

I agree with your excellent points and thoughtful examples. I may take this up further in express activity 5, when I write my comments, but based on an informal survey it’s clear that the information technology environments at universities are increasingly resembling the workplace. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are becoming increasingly common for university students, and not only in the United States.

I also agree that the multiple expression support in KeyMath is valuable. When a student needs software that can compute derivatives, integrals, differential equations, etc., then they’ll need to turn to something else, as suggested in my comment on express activity 4.

I find collaborative, real-time editing difficult with a screen reader. The Monarch may be able to help with this, but I suspect it will remain hard, especially if other people are making numerous concurrent changes. Fortunately, I haven’t worked on projects that insist on editing documents during meetings. I always turn text to speech off and use a Braille display exclusively in online meetings, and the Monarch’s multiple lines could be an asset here.

[Jason_White]

I would like to take up one additional point: I agree that those moving into employment generally need to be able to use a computer. At least for some higher-level positions, though, they also need to have the skills in place to learn new software quickly and without assistance. This can be illustrated with the following scenarios. They’re all realistic, since they’re all loosely based on my own experience.

• You want to register for a professional conference and submit a presentation proposal. The conference organizers are using a Web application for this which is completely unfamiliar to you.
• You’ve been invited to participate in a cooperative project with other organizations. The project uses meeting and collaboration software that you’ve never encountered before. There’s a registration link in an invitational message in you’re email, and the project starts tomorrow…
• You want to read some work-related books. The books are hosted in an unfamiliar online reading platform.
• Your employer introduces a mandatory training program for everyone in your department. The training is delivered via software you’ve never heard of, developed by a company that is probably only known to people who are in the business of buying these tools on behalf of organizations, and of course there’s a deadline to complete the training…
• You arrive in a new workplace, enthusiastic about the career opportunity. Then you discover that your new employer is using productivity and collaboration tools that you’ve never experienced before. Perhaps the computer on your desk is running an unfamiliar operating system and screen reader. It’s time to learn fast…
• Your employer introduces new security software that you need to install and set up on your phone before the deadline.

Can the Monarch help with this problem? Perhaps having more of the user interface available at once on the display, instead of having to explore it by navigating to one control at a time would be an advantage in coming to terms with new software rapidly.

[Deborah_Armstrong]

Oh My! Everyone of those scenarios has happened to me in my various jobs. Unfamiliar web apps, employer-mandated training, strange reading platforms protected by DRM, collaboration tools used in realtime, strange interfaces to unfamiliar security software and instructions that tell you to click on the three dots, the blue E or the red star!

I think one issue with this is psychological. If a blind person is seen as competent, say because they can use keystrokes to navigate and format Word documents even more rapidly than sighted co-workers, then it is naturally assumed they will be equally efficient with any computer-based task. A previous supervisor, watching me work with a familiar website, could not understand why our in-house database app was giving me trouble and she insisted on believing I was simply malingering!

And trying to figure out these interfaces is so frustrating especially when you have other work responsibilities and deadlines!

We have some in-house database software built as a front-end on to Microsoft SQL server, that shows student data in grids which unfortunately a screen reader cannot handle with normal table navigation. Because I’m a paraprofessional, I’m expected to deal with data as often as I assist students. And as the end of the fiscal year approaches, I am mostly dealing with data.

I have to poke around the grid with arrow keys and sometimes get dropped to a different row or column because their keyboard navigation is inconsistent. I feel like a bird building a nest, grabbing one little stick of data at a time.

Also when Windows 7 came out, screen readers suddenly had inconsistent access to the mouse. If you’ve used Windows for a while, you know you could reliably navigate an entire active window with the JAWS mouse, or invisible cursor and “click” on anything you wanted. That ability disappeared, and now the information you get when moving the mouse with a screen reader is unreliable. I was told Microsoft limited the ability for third-party software to be able to move the mouse, but I don’t know more about this change. However it greatly limited our ability to work with applications that did not have full keyboard navigation.

And even when you do have full keyboard navigation you are limited to reading what has focus, when the surrounding text might be just as relevant. Of course you can ask a screen reader to read the entire window, often a morass of information, so it’s either the entire thing or the single control with focus.

Plus, screen readers don’t give you any spatial feel for screen layout.

Of course Mac users still can navigate and read everything onscreen, but many applications require Windows.

If the Monarch would be able to let me “see” more of the screen than I can with either the one-dimensional nature of speech or a single-line Braille display, that would be awesome.

[Deborah_Armstrong]

As someone who absolutely loves to read, I am quite happy with Victor Reader, so the below quibbles should be taken in the spirit intended.
I love-love having multiple lines of Braille. I have tried some cookbooks; can get to a recipe much faster. I have tried Science fiction; I am more deeply immersed in the story with more lines at my disposal because I can read rapidly with both hands. All the worlds created for example by S.M. Sterling were something I could previously only get lost in when listening to the book being read with speech. And I’m a fast Braille reader. But now it seems I’m nearly as fast on the Monarch as I am with hardcopy Braille. And because the epub books reflow, they work quite nicely in the Victor Reader, and the speed of being able to read them is helping me enjoy electronic Braille more than speech.
It’s a different story for BRF files. Though they import, I am not sure why reflow, which works so well on the NLS eReader wasn’t implemented.
Also the import feature is kind of klutzy. I have finally gotten a few chapters of some accessible math books in Word, using the equation editor created by another college. They were in zip files, and I couldn’t import them because that file format “wasn’t supported”.
This is plain silly. It is in fact the .zip format it is talking about, because after unzipping them on my PC and moving the unzipped files back to the Monarch, then using import again, it was all good.
But this thing can already unzip files, because epub is just zip with a different file extension!
And an ordinary non-tech users won’t know what that error message means.
The user shouldn’t even need to have to import really, as I said in a previous post, the device should auto-import as soon as you tap on a file, zipped or not.
And it should import directly from the file manager.
Basically the interface I envision is this: you locate a file and tap on it and a configuration setting determines whether it asks “Import in to Victor Reader? (Yes/No)” or it just does it.
And if you import from inside Victor Reader you are presented with the file manager interface and have to poke around and are often unsure where you are in the file system especially since it shows you all those empty and irrelevant android folders. I put all my stuff in a folder labeled Import, but many users don’t know how to create folders in an organized manner. And when you open an empty folder, the one-line message reads “no items” which could completely confuse a beginner. It should instead say:
“Path:
storage\import\mathBooks
This folder is empty.
Press the Space with E or the backspace to return to the previous folder.”
There’s plenty of screen real estate for that.
I spent some time with Treasure island but I’m not seeing that much difference with e-BRL, except that it is better formatted than BRF. I tried to jump to links in the table of contents which is part of the E-BRL standard but it didn’t work, the display didn’t move with point and click. I must be missing something here.
The Help screen for Victor Reader is the same as the help screen for KeyBRF. You have to do chord-M to get all the features.
The heading level navigation seems a little weird. I would have thought it would be better to type numbers for the heading levels, for example 3 for level 3, but it does work.
Victor wastes a line of precious screen real estate using a blank line to mark the start of a paragraph. A 2-space indent would be more efficient and fit more Braille onscreen.
I am very impressed with the flexibility of the bookshare support; especially reading lists, history and that a teacher can assign books to a student and have them see them right there in Victor reader, easily available to grab. It’s better support than any other app to date.
Well it’s the weekend so I’m going back to my science fiction – live long and prosper S.M. Sterling!

[esigmund]

Hey @Jason_White - our developers were able to reproduce the issue you documented in the web browsing section! Just wanted to report back that they are on it. Thanks!

[Ronit_Mazzoni]

I wanted to add some additional feedback, some of which has already been mentioned. I completely agree that while editing in KeyBRF, when you have reached the bottom of the display when writing large blocks of text and then the display must scroll, I’d love it if it could just scroll up from the bottom, allowing you to keep what you previously written in view, rather than completely giving you a blank display to work with once the first “screen” has filled. I always like to see what I’ve written on the previous line.
Secondly, in the file manager, when deleting a file, since there are keystrokes that you can press to do many functions, why is it not possible to type a “y” when asked if you are sure you want to delete or move a file? Even if the default was to put you on the “ok” button, rather than making you scroll to it or point and click, this would be so much faster. On other braille notetakers, you can simply type “y” and it would perform the delete or move. Not having this functionality makes things clunky and slow.
In addition, when putting the monarch to sleep temporarily, I have noticed that sometimes it’ll “wake up” all by itself and start talking. This is quite distracting and always surprising!
In the same line of thinking, it would be great if it had an automatic “go to sleep” after a certain amount of time has passed. I have accidentally left it on a few times and had the battery drain on me unexpectedly. Most other notetakers have the ability to go to sleep after some number of minutes of inactivity.