Express Activity 5: Your Vision for the Monarch in Employment & Transition

[adresselhaus]

The Monarch is a powerful tool that enhances access, instruction, and engagement for individuals who are blind or have low vision. Whether working with individuals preparing for CIE or clients currently in CIE settings, understanding how the Monarch can improve workplace access, digital literacy, and independent learning is critical.

Discussion Prompt

In your post, reflect on the following:

Three ways the Monarch will change or improve instruction, training, or access to employment-related tasks for your students or clients. Consider digital literacy, assistive technology integration, workplace documentation, or professional communication.

Two features you are most excited to teach or use with your students or clients in workplace settings. This could include tools like the Tactile Viewer for reviewing workplace maps, the Braille Editor for document creation, or Math Mode for completing job-related calculations.

One way the Monarch will help individuals interact with colleagues, supervisors, or team members in a professional environment. Think about note-taking in meetings, reading digital files, or accessing job-related training materials.

Optional Extension:

If you have already worked with an individual using the Monarch in a CIE setting, share an example of its impact in the workplace!

This discussion will allow us to explore real-world applications of the Monarch for individuals seeking or thriving in competitive integrated employment. Let’s share ideas and support one another in preparing students and clients for success!

[Jason_White]

The prompt for this Activity is very much oriented toward project participants in the blindness services field who have students or clients in education or employment. As I’m not in this category, my response necessarily departs somewhat from the answers sought in the discussion prompt, but I try to cover the same territory.

Where the Monarch Has its Greatest Advantages

The Monarch will soon have all of the capabilities of conventional Braille displays and notetakers. It is thus useful for all of the employment-related tasks in which such devices are effective. This is already a wide range of potential applications. However, as we know, the Monarch can do much more than conventional devices, with up to ten lines of Braille and tactile graphics capability. I would summarize its potential areas of advantage as follows. (This is not meant as an exhaustive list; others will no doubt add to it.)

• Wherever tactile graphics are useful: this encompasses many academic disciplines and employment requiring skills in these fields. I think automatically generated images (graphs, charts, maps generated from geospatial data, various types of diagrams) offer especially good opportunities to adapt the process of producing graphics to create high-quality tactile representations without requiring human intervention such as manual image editing.
• Tasks requiring multiple lines of Braille to be access quickly, such as manipulating mathematical expressions, reading musical scores, or working with documents containing original text and translated text side by side. Spatially presented mathematics is a notable example. Chemistry notation is another relevant case, as it often gives a two-dimensional representation of chemical structures.
• Tasks involving extensive and detailed reading of text, in which use of the butterfly technique can increase reading speed and thus provide efficiency advantages. Having multiple lines displayed at once should also reduce the need to use navigational commands, also contributing to efficiency. Not only is it no longer necessary to press a panning button at the end of each line, as in conventional displays, but one can often simply reach down to the next paragraph or heading on the display instead of having to move hands to a keyboard and issue a navigation command.
• Tasks requiring information from multiple sources to be accessed quickly, such as working with an application in one window while monitoring incoming messages or notifications in another. Online meetings are a good case in point, since messages or notifications may need to be monitored regularly while engaging in other meeting-related tasks, for example reviewing a document. So far as I know, only the JAWS screen reader has so far taken advantage of the possibility of dividing a Braille display so as to present the contents of one application or window in part of the display, and another application or window in the remainder. With 10 lines of 32 cells each, the Monarch makes this method of working even more attractive for tasks that would benefit from it.
• There may be advantages in gaining an overview of information, especially if it can be presented spatially, as in the structure of a graphical user interface or in the formatting of a document. Programming tasks may benefit from having, e.g., an entire function or definition on the display at once - or at least more of it than a single line.

Challenges

I think there are two transitions interest, assuming an academic career pathway into a career opportunity requiring at least an undergraduate degree. I’m not well equipped to discuss non-academic paths, so I’ll leave those for others to explore. The first is the transition from secondary school to university. Increasingly, the technological environment of the university seems to be resembling the workplace environment, with the adoption of widely used productivity and collaboration tools in higher education (e.g., Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, perhaps in some cases open-source equivalents such as Nextcloud). With respect to technical skill development, perhaps the secondary school to university transition is where most of the prerequisite knowledge that will later serve in a career needs to come into play. The academic environment may also necessitate the use of specialized applications such as learning management systems, full-text document databases, or discipline-specific software.

The second transition is that from higher education into a career opportunity. Note that the software used in the work environment may be different from that of the university, even if functionally similar. Different work environments require different software, hence the need for good generic technological skills to be in place in the part of the person who is making the move from student to professional. The person in transition must be able to adapt easily to a new and potentially unfamiliar software environment, including productivity and collaboration tools as well as whatever specialized applications may be required.

The Monarch, too, needs to integrate well into the software that the user interacts with in completing work-related tasks. As noted in discussing Express Activity 3, improving this capability further may involve not only the use of the Monarch with screen readers, but also improving its ability to run generic Android applications (not specifically written for it), support for Web-based applications, and additional custom software development. Obviously, this issue arises at all levels, but it becomes especially prominent in higher education and workplace contexts in which software features are required that cannot realistically be provided by custom tools written for the Monarch, thus requiring the Monarch to serve as a means of accessing mainstream applications.

[Deborah_Armstrong]

It’s hard to say anything that Jason has not already covered so thoroughly and adeptly.
More and more both in K12, higher education and the workplace, I see the expanding role of web-based apps. And from chatting with friends and our own I.T. department I know employers want to avoid distributing computers to every worker, so more and more “thin clients” those that run a web browser are the growing trend. For example in California, DOR tends to purchase iPads for students rather than laptops. Our local K12 schools hand out Chromebooks instead of laptops like before. And reading about technology trends reinforces this idea. Our own I.T. department tries every year to give me a thin client or remote access to a central Windows server rather than refreshing my own Windows PCS, and I have to keep telling them that I still need to use desktop apps to be efficient.
The reason behind this is not so much funding as it is maintenance. To maintain a large base of different Windows and Mac configurations for a big organization takes a lot of I.T. working hours. But if employees have identical thin clients, the work to maintain the devices is much simpler. If more and more applications are in the cloud, I.T. need not install or update apps, back up data or worry about weird error messages users keep getting when attaching devices.
So in the future, the Monarch might morph to become just another albeit accessible thin client in a large organization.
Therefore, though the Monarch must display results generated by a screen reader to be truly at home in the workplace, the ability to run web applications and ensure they are accessible will truly help level the playing field for blind workers and students.
As stated before, having more lines of Braille speeds access to information. If you are in real-time communicating with a customer and looking up information in a database, you really need to access that data rapidly. Many entry-level jobs have quotas; for example, when I started in product support decades ago, I was expected to take thirty calls per hour! Blind people who cannot keep up due to technology limitations might be the first people to let go when downsizing is eminent, and they’ll never advance to quality jobs.
It is a sad reality that there are often more technology barriers in entry-level work. For example, those in tech support are expected to be able to access a customer’s computer remotely. Those in clerical jobs may have to still file paper or answer phones on an inaccessible PBX. If the Monarch can justify its expense to the employer by making the blind worker as efficient in an entry-level job as his sighted colleagues, it will help them advance to a real career.
The Monarch will certainly improve taking online training for the same reason; rapid access to a screenful of data. Built-in speech also lets those new to sight loss, struggling to become proficient in Braille listen and read simultaneously. Just as low-vision folks magnify words when they need to see how they are spelled or gain spatial information, but listen to speech to get through material faster, Braille users might do the same thing: reading with speech to get through a long document while using Braille to check out the layout, the spelling and the formatting.
I can also see point and click, combined with a screen reader making many of those applications that do not have good keyboard navigation more accessible. Scroll/pan the Braille to the appropriate icon and click it for rapid access to a screen with a complex layout.
Right now, I’m struggling with a web app for an online class that requires I highlight some text and then comment on it. It is not accessible to JAWS. The Monarch browser is still too primitive to solve this problem, but in the future, perhaps it can. (If you are curious the app is Perusall.)
It’s also much faster and more accurate to proofread with the Monarch. I had to OCR some class handouts and using the Monarch rather than my single-line display to proof them gave me more free time in the day!
I used to work as a technical writer and for Stenograph, I wrote five user guides for CAT (computer-aided transcription) systems over a year. I put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime because I wasn’t as fast as a sighted person, even though I in many cases was a better writer than my sighted co-workers. With the Monarch, I could have completed the work in half the time. I would have been able to pull up the software I was documenting on my single computer, while writing and proofing the documentation on the Monarch. And when it came time to prepare the index and table of contents, though I still would have done it on a PC, I could have had the document easily searchable on the Monarch for reference.
Regarding the two tools I’m most excited about, definitely the Victor Reader, especially since ePub becomes more and more popular as an eBook format and Keyword. I know people have long complained that word processors on special-purpose devices are not powerful enough but I think that is plain silly. My sighted colleagues compose first drafts on android tablets or iPads all the time, and they move them to a PC or Mac to add tables, charts, embedded spreadsheets, headers/footers, styles, photos, footnotes and a table of contents. I think those that complain about Keyword not being powerful enough are thinking it’s going to be the only word processing tool for blind users, which it should not be. As long as we are pencil-impaired we need an easy way to write our first drafts, take notes and log stuff.
I don’t know how often you graph equations in the workplace, but you certainly make calculations. Keymath lets you save the results of many calculations, unlike some of the primitive 4-function calculators on other Braille devices or those that talk. I found figuring out discounts on purchases, calculating sales tax, managing a budget and such simple everyday tasks easy to do on Keymath and even though I could have used Excel, tracking what cell I’m in is harder than simply creating a list of expressions with their results.
The Monarch especially since it has a visual display is going to improve the ability for blind folks to be less isolated in school or work. In a classroom, they can work with a team on a group project because others can see what they are writing/calculating. In my job, one advantage I have with zoom is that I can lead a team, sharing my screen and drafting a collaborative document while others who are sighted add suggestions. When we used whiteboards in the past, I could never truly be part of a working group. With the monarch attached to a projector, a blind person can take the lead in a team discussion so everyone can see what they are writing!
Though this post didn’t ask me to reflect on challenges, I will take the liberty to do so. Not all workplace graphics, for example are going to be accessible on what for sighted folks is a very small piece of screen real estate on the Monarch. To us blind folks it’s huge, but sighted people haven’t worked with such a small screen since the TRS-80 model 100!
Also the charts and graphs used in business depend heavily on color. We will still need AI to describe those to us, unless the Monarch develops a magic method for showing us which lines are read and which items are shaded are blue.
The Monarch lacks a contacts app, which in the workplace will be essential; it should sync with google suite and office 365 so the user will have a personal “rolodex” at their fingertips. My iPhone can access active directory so I can quickly find a co-worker’s email or phone extension, but I have to hook up a bluetooth display to ensure I’m spelling/pronouncing their name correctly.
The Monarch also needs to run Android apps like Jason said; right now the ones I’d most use are Cisco Jabber, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Discord; all prominent in my workplace. Access to calendars as well is going to be important.
For helping folks speed up Braille reading and writing, text adventure games cannot be beat. When I got my first iPod, I loaded it up with adventure games to force me to learn to type on the onscreen keyboard. A user of any age is more likely to develop speed playing games than reading a textbook or writing a term paper. So though the chess is great, we need text games, even the public domain “original Adventure-- colossal cave” would help those learning to type/read on the Monarch.
Lastly, I think its size and expense is going to be a challenge hard to overcome. I still haven’t dragged it on the bus to work, because finding a bag hasn’t happened and I’m too thrifty to buy one for a device I do not own. Pulling out my little phone to look up something quick is easier, and dropping the NLS eReader in to my purse gets me enough Braille to survive a day at work. Typically it’s easier to bring my work home to do on the Monarch then bring the Monarch to the office.
And the expense – It’s hard enough to write a justification that convinces DOR to buy a laptop instead of an iPad for blind students here in California, let alone asking them to purchase a Monarch! Maybe DOR is more generous in other parts of the country, but here we keep telling the DOR counselors that you cannot survive in college without a computer.
So let’s hope we can get Monarchs in to the hands of those who need it most!

[Jason_White]

I agree with your observations here, which are well informed and well articulated. There have been suggestions in the media recently that Android may evolve into a desktop operating system suitable for laptops, so the choice of an Android-based environment may turn out to be advantageous for future Monarch-related development. As you say, the Monarch can potentially serve as a “thin client”, while providing access to a full desktop or laptop host system with a screen reader in circumstances in which this is the better option. Flexibility is paramount, it seems to me, as technological diversity can be expected to persist in workplaces and educational institutions. For example, Mac usage has reportedly increased in enterprise environments in recent years. Linux adoption is growing, including recent moves in the European Union deriving from concerns about digital sovereignty. I think the next decade will be characterized by a diversity of devices and software preferences.

I also echo your comments about the value of the Monarch in reading and proofreading documents, which naturally also apply to graduate-level research or text-intensive professions. Integrating text and graphics in a single device is a major advance over what has been commercially available in the past.

I concur entirely with your observations regarding the value of efficiency, which is sometimes overlooked in discussions of accessibility, but which is of great practical importance. This is even true if one is undertaking a complex task with no deadline: the more valuable work can be performed in a given amount of time, the greater the contribution one can make in total.