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

Expanded Core Curriculum Mastering the Monarch
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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!

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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.

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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!

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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.

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The Monarch has the potential to reshape instruction and access for students and clients preparing for competitive integrated employment in several powerful ways. First, it supports digital literacy through a unified, tactile-first interface that encourages fluency across applications like web browsing, email, and word processing. This kind of digital interaction is critical in nearly every job sector today. Second, it promotes independent access to workplace documents—students can read, edit, and navigate PDFs, spreadsheets, or reports in multiple formats without relying on a sighted intermediary. Third, the Monarch integrates assistive technology into job training, providing a seamless way to introduce Braille literacy, tactile graphics, and tech skills in tandem—making it easier for educators and vocational rehab professionals to align training with real-world tools.
The two features I’m most excited to teach in workplace settings are the Braille Editor and the Tactile Viewer. The Braille Editor not only supports clear, efficient document creation but also gives users agency to write reports, edit logs, and manage content in a professional environment. The Tactile Viewer, on the other hand, opens up access to spatial and visual information that was often out of reach—floorplans, seating charts, organizational workflows, or even presentation diagrams can be explored tactually. This is a huge leap forward for workplace navigation and comprehension.
One major way the Monarch will help individuals engage with colleagues and supervisors is by enabling real-time note-taking and file review during meetings. Instead of listening passively or relying on audio recordings, users can follow presentations in sync, jot down thoughts, and access reference materials during the session—all in Braille. This fosters active participation and supports a more equal footing in professional conversations.
I’m looking forward to seeing how others plan to bring the Monarch into employment settings, and I’m already brainstorming how to adapt this tool for specific industries like education, public service, and the arts. The possibilities are exciting and very real.

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Thanks for this rich and incredibly thoughtful post, Deborah. You’ve highlighted so many structural and cultural challenges that blind professionals face, especially in entry-level roles—your example about quotas really resonated with me. As someone who teaches music to blind students, many of whom go on to collaborate with sighted musicians, I think often about how essential it is to reduce the time gap between accessing content and responding or producing work. That need for real-time fluency—whether in customer service, a classroom, or an ensemble—is where I see the Monarch truly excelling.

Your points about collaborative tools like Zoom or Discord made me think about how powerful the Monarch’s visual display could be in group settings. While I don’t teach with the Monarch directly, I regularly use tactile tools to convey the visual structure of music notation to blind students. If a tool like the Monarch can support shared visual-tactile interfaces in real time, it could bridge that gap even further, especially when team communication is key. Like you, I’d love to see integration with broader cloud-based ecosystems (Google, Microsoft, etc.) to make the device truly workplace-ready.

Thank you again for sharing your real-world experience so candidly. It’s giving the rest of us plenty to reflect on and advocate for.

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Thanks, Jason—your post really got me thinking. I work at a music school for blind and low-vision students, where we prepare learners not only for artistic expression but also for real-world performance and collaboration—often alongside sighted peers. My focus is helping students develop literacy in both braille music code and the broader ecosystem of tools that support independent access and communication.

What stood out most in your post was your point about how multiple lines of braille can enhance productivity in ways we’re only beginning to tap into. In my world, that translates directly into working with full measures of music, comparative score analysis, and even teaching students how to interpret layout conventions in notation. These are not just “nice to have” features—they’re essential when blind musicians need to rehearse or perform with sighted ensembles that rely heavily on visual cues.

I also appreciated your mention of screen division and side-by-side views. That kind of functionality could allow students to access rehearsal notes while reading a part, or switch quickly between a score and reference materials like lyrics, cues, or a conductor’s annotations. And yes—this kind of adaptability is crucial not just for school, but for the transition into professional environments, whether that’s a studio, classroom, or performance venue.

In short, the Monarch has the potential to bridge a gap we’ve been trying to close for years: not just access to information, but access to workflow. Thanks for mapping out the broader context—it’s incredibly helpful to see how those of us in specialized areas like music can connect to this larger conversation.

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The braille music application for the Monarch that we can readily imagine is yet to be written. MusicXML should make it easier to convert scores automatically to braille music, but then there is a need for navigation functions and other features designed to make reading and interaction easier. Conversion from braille to MusicXML would obviously be desirable as well.

When I completed musical theory exams as a secondary school student, I wrote my answers in braille and then read them out to an exam supervisor who transcribed them into print notation. With suitable software, the Monarch could eliminate the transcription process. I agree with you that score interpretation is fundamental, and inherently multilinear.

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Everyone has already said very succinctly a lot of the thoughts I have about integrating the monarch in to CIE. I do think that this will change quite a bit once I am able to test it with JAWS in braille terminal mode. However, I may not get access to this on my work computer so that may take longer. I honestly think the size and weight of the unit will be more difficult to get over for employment-related tasks. I have a small work station both at work and at home and can only really fit a one-line braille display alongside my laptop. Maybe if I had more room and when bluetooth connectivity to laptops becomes a possibility, this may become easier. I think the braille editor will be great for taking notes quickly. However, I do feel the keyword app is not function rich enough to use for true word processing and checking formatting etc. My job has a lot of writing and reading of medical record information and I actually use word only for writing my own notes. For reviewing charts, I use epic, an EMR system for medical records. I think having access to the terminal mode could be great in helping those who want to read complex medical records more quickly as well as proofread chart notes. I am not able to test the keymail app with my work email as I was hoping to becuase of restrictions on the type of device we use. I believe at least one other person had this same issue. I think this is a huge down side to this unit having proprietary software on it that IT departments do not recognize. I have not tried to fight the denial from my IT department. Being able to run more mainstream apps on the monarch would really be amazing in CIE and until that can be done, I am not sure that this unit alone will make employment more possible for blind job seekers.

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Three ways the Monarch will change or improve instruction:

  1. Students will be able to access materials in real time with their peers, which will increase their digital literacy.
  2. They will be able to access screen readers (hopefully soon) with a full page of braille instead of one line at a time will increase their digital literacy in terms of understanding a webpage, increasing research abilities, and increasing their AT skills.
  3. The use of tactile graphics will allow the student to be able to access concepts in real time as peers, and increasing their understanding which will help them in various areas of employment.

Two features:

  1. Math mode, especially with my student who will be taking a higher level math course this year.
  2. Braille Editor/Word Processor, especially with my student who loves to read and write.

One way the Monarch will help individuals interact with collogues, team members, supervisors, etc.

Individuals will be able to use the Word Processor to create/access documents similar to their collogues, access graphics/make graphics, as well as, access articles and various materials at their finger tips, allowing for a more even playing field.

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I have a different perspective not being a teacher myself, but rather a blind technology professional. The Monarch has incredible potential to impact learning and productivity in the workplace. The ability to access training materials and resources, building / campus maps, data charts,etc. Some other stand-out applications would be reviewing complex spreadsheets / data tables and reviewing computer code where indentation structure matters. Even reviewing text within greater context rather than limited to a traditional single line of braille at a time is transformational. With the exception of the math functions, I believe individuals will find it fairly easy to learn and apply to their work. There is no limit to the potential useful applications of a multi-line braille web browser for endless uses.

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I am looking at this topic from the perspective of a person who is employed in settings alongside sighted peers. The Monarch will give me the capability to edit text for formatting, as well as for spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It will give me the capability to view images my colleagues create. It will give me the ability to easily access notes when reading documents and giving presentations without the need for a ton of scrolling, as is now necessary with a single line braille display.

I am excited to use the tactile graphics viewer to see graphics my colleagues have created. I am excited also to use KeyWord to create and edit documents that I will share with my colleagues.

This device will give me the ability to tactilely experience visual data, and will support this type of collaboration between myself and my sighted coworkers.