To give a presentation on the Monarch, I wrote it in Markdown, then converted it to an HTML slide set using the reveal.js option in Pandoc. Someone else had to run the slides during my presentation, though, as it was given remotely and there’s no easy way to transfer video output from the Monarch to an online meeting.
This limitation in giving presentations change, of course, as soon as screen reader support becomes available for the Monarch’s Braille Terminal mode - probably just a matter of months away now.
To read the slides on the Monarch, I converted them using Pandoc to Microsoft Word format, then loaded the file onto the Monarch so it was readable in KeyWord.
This arrangement isn’t perfect, but it worked for my purposes. I could read ahead on the multi-line display while speaking.
I was able to set up a Bookshare account on the Monarch. I work at the Louisiana Center for the Blind, which has an organization/school account. I was able to assign books to the student account and download the books on the Monarch with no problems.
I teach adults that are going to college or work. Being able to read a book with multiple lines will be an asset for my students in many ways.
One of my students that plans to go to college is working on a final project that will use PowerPoint. I would like her to have her presentation notes on the Monarch to help her when presenting. The multiple lines will be helpful to read the notes and have a better understanding of the outline of the presentation. If time allows, I would also like her to read an article on the Monarch to add to her presentation research.
I also set up an NFB Newsline account and subscribed to two newspapers in North Louisiana and two magazines. I think that having the multiple lines to be able to skim the articles will be an asset when my students are doing research. I will also enjoy reading the recipes in Better Homes and Gardens.
I agree that it would be beneficial to read PowerPoint presentations.
It would be nice for my student to be able to read her presentation. She could even be able to ask her professors in college to give her the presentation to review before or after class. I do not see a student carrying the Monarch to class due to the heaviness and expense.
I also agree that cloud storage would be extremely helpful. I use One Drive mostly for work and personally. I also use Drop Box personally.
My students learn about cloud storage to help them to be prepared for school and work. I have watched laptops change over the years. They no longer have removable storage like CDs or SD card slots. Some laptops only come with two USB ports. Therefore, transferring files using a USB drive is not as convenient as cloud storage. For example, APH is using SharePoint to share files with us. What if we wanted to access those files on the Monarch? Or, for a student to have more instant access to files. They can share a folder with their instructor.
I am also a massage therapist and took a CEU course that used Google Classroom and Google Drive. Again, it would be nice to be able to access these files directly on the Monarch.
I know that these things take time, and I am hoping this will be a consideration for the future. I also understand that security and privacy is a huge challenge.
The Word app was a great place to Braille spatial math problems. I liked being able to type notes to the students when correcting the classwork. One challenge is that the students have to remember the editing keystrokes. I plan on providing a Braille copy of the most frequently used editing keystrokes for them to keep in their classwork ring binder for eacy reference whether they are working on math or text documents.
I have used all of the applications on the Monarch, as I am a Braillenote Touch user. The only application that was new to me, was the Tactile Viewer app. Two things really jump out at me when using the Monarch.
1. I really miss access to the Google PlayStore. I understand this is for a reason, but this feels like a real big limitation. I really would like to have access to other apps not installed on the Monarch. Web apps simply do not cut it!
2. Support for the Voiceover screen reader. Again, I understand this is temporary, but I live and breathe Apple. I understand most professionals, and students use Windows with NVDA or JAWS. Hopefully this is a short wait for Voiceover users on the iPhone/iPad/Mac.
For me personally this unit, with the included software does not fit my work needs. No support for the Apple ecosystem, and no 3rd party app support. As a professional, I would not recommend it, but for a student, it is perfect. Access to everything they may need in the classroom.
I explored a lot of different applications on the Monarch including the braille editor, the standard editor, Victor Reader and of course, Tactile Viewer. The most challenging application that I found honestly was the standard editor, and not because it is an application that is particularly difficult to use. It just has a ton of shortcut keys that can be learned, which again, is not a bad thing at all. Especially since the Monarch is very menu-driven, and allows people to scroll through those menus and then eventually learning the shortcuts that they are likely to use the most.
In Victor Reader, I logged into Bookshare, and spent some time reading books. I liked that I could read several lines of a book without needing to pan as much. However, needing to take my fingers off of the screen while the device was refreshing is something that I had to really take some time to get use to. Even now, I am not very use to it, and sometimes I have to hold down the point and click key to refresh the device because I might either have extra dots or dots missing. Still, it is something that I will eventually get use to as I continue to work with the device.
I did also log into my email with the Monarch, and spend a lot of time reading emails, as well as composing emails using the device. It’s so great to be able to just reach my fingers up without needing to scroll back using a screen reader or a single-line display, and just be able to instantly see if I have formatted my message correctly, and make sure that there are no spelling mistakes. Just being able to edit with the Monarch has been a game changer for me because of these features.
I think I actually use Tactile Viewer the most, but I will not put too much about that here, as I provided impressions of Tactile Viewer in another post. My only issue with it is that there is currently no dot height capability so that you can be able to have greater variations when it comes to viewing different tactile graphics.
In working with college students, I could see them using the following apps:
Tactiel Viewer and the APH TGL, for fun and educational purposes. Having such instant access to tactile graphics is pretty awesome.
Victor Reader app for reading Bookshare books. Our university provides training for students who don’t know how to use Bookshare, and braille would be essential for some students.
Math. We get a lot of students who ask, “I’ve always done math in braille and turned it in at school. My college professor doesn’t know braillle. How will turning in assignments work?”
Using the BRF editor for Sudoku:
I had to get used to not having cursor routing buttons and so reviewed the navigate by lines, words and characters in the Braille editor. The really fun thing I did was to explore Sudoku puzzles on the Monarch. This would be an excellent learning opportunity for students who need to practice:
•Tracking practice
•Cursor navigation
•Practice entering Nemeth numbers
I first typed out a Sudoku puzzle in the Braille editor that I had in a Braille book. I also copied down a puzzle that was offered to me by Chat GPT upon my request. Wanting more opportunities to solve puzzles, I reached out to the Multi-Line Braille Display Users group email list ans mentioned what I was doing.
One of the developers at SeeingHands.org took a few minutes with some software and developed 5 levels of 50 puzzles each, from easiest to hardest. The dificulty level was determined merely by the number of blanks in the puzzle. These are BRF files.
Since Sudoku puzzles are usualy a 9 by 9 grid, this works perfectly on the Monarch. (You don’t have a representation of the thick lines that separate each 3 by 3 grid, but that’s OK with me.). I specified that I wanted the set up puzzle’s numbers to be in UEB numbers, with the blank squares being notated by two hyphens. Then, the person working the puzzle could position the cursor, delete the two hyphens and insert a Nemeth number (number sign plus number.). That way, you can differentiate which number was there originally in the puzzle and which number was added by the person solving the puzzle.
Two things needed to happen to be successful:
Go to Braille and navigation settings: Turn off “Show text editor indicators.” That way, the format marker is not at the upper left corner, which throws off the line by two cells.
Be sure to enter editing mode with X plus space bar. Then you can edit the puzzle and save it.
I have permission to share the website where you can get this zip file of all five levels of the Sudoku puzzles. It is my suggestion that APH include this in future Monarch files. This is such an excellent exercise in so many ways and makes Sudoku spatially accessible! This developer is also wondering about other spatial games that may benefit from being presented on the Monarch. Here’s the link where you can download this file.
I have also explored all apps on the Monarch. I will need practice with the Chess game, but I am excited to show this to my students as so many games are not accessible to them. Chess is such a master’s game!
I thought it was interesting that you could use the KeyMath app as a calculator. I wondered about this as there was no separate KeyCalculator app on the Monarch.
I am wondering if we will have the ability to add Google apps. My students all use Google Classroom, and need a device where this is accessible to them.
Explored all the apps, but since I was on the WingIt Beta that was my main one I wanted to explore. The main thing was turning on the audio to help anyone navigate, and switching to uncontracted as well for our folks new to Braille. Other than that no other issues do I see arising.
Thank you for the excellent tip to view graphics on webpages by clicking on them to ⠕⠏⠢ them in the ⠠⠞⠁⠉⠞⠊⠇⠑ Viewer. I ⠇⠕⠕⠅ forward to trying this out over the next week before posting ⠋⠥⠇⠇⠻ thoughts here. Incidentally, ⠮ way I’ve found ⠞⠕ ⠥⠎⠑ ⠹ board most stabley is, rather than using Crome or Edge on a Windows PC–using Ecosia on the Monarch itself.
I love KeyMath because tactiles for math have always required a lot of setup and space. Now, you can bring up angles right on the same device you’re doing your math homework on, and complete everything without needing all that extra room. I haven’t tried to see if it’s possible to attach a tactile picture and insert it into a Word document, but that would be amazing—especially for research papers.
Of course, there are challenges with using KeyMath. You’re not just writing or brailling in a document—you’re following a protocol for entering information and memorizing the commands to do it. There’s definitely a learning curve, but with enough practice, it should become second nature.
One more thought: checking a graph to verify an answer may look a little different. Without strong graph literacy—which many blind students in the past have had limited access to—it could be tricky. But with tools like this, that access gap is starting to close.
Bookshare is probably one of my favorite apps on the Monarch. I can assign books to each of my students, whether for pleasure or for school. The larger interface with multiple lines gives it more of a paper-copy feel, but in a digital format. For students who don’t like digital devices because they feel like they only get a small amount of information at a time, this is a real game changer. Another nice feature is that students can access their books on the same device as their peers—just like sighted students do on their computers—making them more independent and faster at accessing their work.
I had fun exploring all of the apps! They were easy to use and similar to other refreshable braille displays I have used. I have never had a need to enter math into a word document yet and was pleased with how easy and straight forward it was. I will need to try it with more complex math as well. My students would rather write everything on their BrailleNote Touch + instead of typing on a computer but editing can be difficult. I know this will make the editing process much easier and I am excited for them to be able to see the formating as well.
The applications I have primarily used include the Wordprocessor,Ecosia,and File Manager, as well as Tactile Viewer, of course. I plan to use E-Mail now that I’m back at school (I’m a teacher) and will soon begin introducing the Monarch to my workflow.
The main hurdle for me, in all of these apps, has been learning to navigate with such a large display. This is also such a bonus, as I’m a huge Braille fan. Having used 18-cell displays from 2001-2008, and then 32-cell displays from 2008 to the present, with some interludes of 20-cell models, suddenly having ten lines is both marvelous and difficult. For reading, it’s marvelous, but for composing and editing documents, navigating the web, and moving within the Monarch environment, it’s been a bit of a learning curve. I’m a very impatient person when it comes to tech, so although I catch on relatively quickly, I sometimes become frustrated when I can’t immediately be as productive as I’m used to being on a familiar piece of tech. To that end, a piece of advice I would pass along to a mentor is to use the Monarch first in a low-stakes, slower-paced setting, so as to better equip yourself with the tools and tips which will help you navigate in a more time-sensitive situation.
As I integrate the Monarch in workflow, I think it will help me extremely helpful in creating and reviewing lesson plans in the moment, e-mailing and communicating with families and colleagues, and task-switching with ease. I love how fast I’m able to read text with the ten lines, although I do want to develop my ability to edit more rapidly. For example, I need to be able to quickly point-and-click or use keyboard navigation so that I can read along with a student and mark errors, self-corrections, and similar. Point-and-click works well but sometimes seems to glitch for no apparent reason, so I want to become more fluid with the keyboard commands instead.
I have not yet used the Wing It app yet, bujt also feel it will be useful, both in my own education, and in imparting visual imformation to my sighted students. I’m curious to see how I can embed its features into my teaching.
On a tangential side note, I used this suite of apps when I had a BrailleNote Touch Plus, and maybe it’s just a mental block of mine, but I never liked how the file manager worked re: mark and unmark, etc. I have since transitioned to the BrailleSense products from Selvas, and their File Manager seems much more efficient and reasonable to me. However, this is just my opinion and, doubtless, it’s just another of those things to which I’ll need to accustom myself as I use the Monarch.
And on a final note, I am super eager for terminal mode to work with iOS! Honestly, using the Monarch in my daily work life will be much more appealing once this feature is rolled out.
I looked at most of the applications, probably the most at the tactile viewer. I plan to do more with the Victor Reader but wanted to start with something less familiar. Documentation about it is quite good, and the experience is fun and exciting. As far as challenges, the less familiar someone is with tactile graphics, the greater the possible issues. It takes an extensive amount of time to get used to understanding large graphics; it’s like learning a large puzzle. The key is to remain active and not to get frustrated.
I explored the Victor Reader. I have loaded Bookshare and Newsline. These two resources gave me an opportunity to explore the Monarch’s multiline Braille display.
Students will benefit from this tool, as it will give them an opportunity to read fluently with an opportunity to go back and recall information displayed in the Braille page.An early learning Braille student had difficulties reading the multiline Braille display. I taught him how to use the zoom in and out feature to add space between the lines and it helped him to have a double space between each line.
The Monarch is now my primary device to read books. But it falls short in the portability design.
The applications I explored were:
Tactile Viewer: I found the Tactile Viewer paired with the APH TGIL to provide access to a wide variety of charts and tactile images. It is very useful to have multiple zoom settings for images. However, many of the tactile images in the TGIL only have two zoom levels, and more zoom levels are needed for meaningful exploration of many images. I found exploring impages with arrow keys and point and click to be intuitive, but slow in some cases. It was also easy to loose your spot when moving around images because it was hard to keep a reference point when the display refreshed. I also explored viewing images transferred to the Monarch from my computer in PDF format. I was able to make out some of the details of these images, but it would have been hard to get much from these images without prior knowledge of what they showed (which I had in this case). None of the printed text in the PDFs was legible by touch. I learned that tactile images need to be optimized for use with the Monarch and that raw PDF files don’t work the best. However, these PDF files may be able to give a quick overview if you already have an idea of what you are looking for in the image.
The Tactile Viewer could help students and professionals in CIE in many ways. It could help engineers communicate diagrams with colleagues. It could help researchers and data analysts examine charts and graphs. It could help educators communicate concepts to students, such as the structure of an animal cell or a geographical map. It could help chemists explore molecular structures.
There are a few challenges that individuals might encounter when using the Monarch for CIE. The resolution of the display would make it hard for data analysts and researchers to explore graphs with hundreds or thousands of data points. This could be somewhat helped by incorporating many different zoom levels into these charts. It is also easy to loose your place when using the arrow keys to move around an image. This could be helped by adding a feature where you could have a physical marker to keep track of a specific line, so you can tell where that line is before and after an arrow key press. However, this could get a little tedious if a new marker has to be added to often. Certain shapes, such as circules and arcs, cannot accurately be represented given the Monarch’s resolution and discrete dot system. This could make interpretation of certain images difficult. I am not sure if this can be addressed with the current versions of the Monarch. Maybe in the future there could be a frefreshable display that incorporates both dots for letters and a drawing board system like the draftsman kit to make more continuous-type shapes. This could also be addressed by providing keys for images that describe in words what each shape in the graphs represents.
Key Math: The Key Math application provides a relatively straightforward way to write and plot math functions. I found myself having to consult reference material a little bit more often when using Key Math than when using the Tactile Viewer.
Key Math can be used in CIE to help those who use math in their jobs to more independently plot graphs and to see how changing parts of functions can change graphs. It would also help blind educators teach concepts to teach math concepts.
One challenge that could be encountered is the precision in point and click when exploring graphs. I found that it was difficult to get the exact value on a graph using point and click. For example, if I tried to get the y value at the y intercept, it might be off by a few decimal places. It is difficult to put your finger directly on the y intercept. This could cause a student to get a question wrong on a test or a professional to make incorrect conclusions. I think this could be greatly helped by having a mode where you can navigate a graph with arrow keys by a specified increment on the graph. For example, you could set the increment to 0.5 and then each arrow key press would move you up, down, left, or right by 0.5 units in the graph followed by speech output of the x and y coordinates at that spot. Currently the arrow keys just scroll the graph, which is useful, so it would be nice to have multiple modes of arrow key navigation. The function lines and the axes lines are also quite wide, which makes find precise points more difficult. Perhaps this could be adjusted to use single lines of dots for more precisoin?
Similar to the Tactile Viewer, arcs and circles cannot be accurately displayed due to the resolution on the Monarch. This could mmake interpretation of certain plots difficult. Maybe sonification could be added in a future software update so that more cintuous representations of graphs could be heard alongside the tactile images. This could help resolve cases where arcs look more like discrete steps on the tactile image.
It would also be nice to have the option to hsve multiple graphs side-by-side. Many math problems involve comparing two or more graphs, which would be much easier if multiple graphs could be shown at once.
The primary apps I’ve explored so far besides the tactile viewer, my primary app of interest so far, are Braille Editor/Braille Processor and File Manager. These are largely familiar but better, more updated versions of Keysoft from the Apex. (I know, I’m skipping over the Touch.) They are easy and intuitive to use based on that context. They also give me the opportunity to read books from services that are not yet connected to the Monarch or even old Bookshare files I already have if the internet is not available. The ability to read lines of Braille fluently and to input “natively” will be a huge advantage for CIE-seeking clients. It is wonderful to read aloud during a presentation while still “looking” at the audience or to digest information quickly, easily, and discreetly, especially if Braille/tactile media is a person’s primary learning media. For reading and writing tasks like this, the challenges will come about for people who learn to read Braille later or who learned it without integration into the curriculum earlier in life. There could also be challenges in memorizing commands for those who aren’t as familiar with the Humanware platforms, but the context-sensitive help does alleviate those challenges as much as possible.