Humanware

And we're really happy to welcome Amanda Ness, who will be doing the first part of the tutorial.

she'll be doing the standard she'll be doing the standalone features some of the standalone features and I'll be showing you the speech features as well as the as well as the terminal features so it's going to be fun if we need to do a part two we'll definitely do a part two but i'm going to uh hand it over to amanda um to start us off with some of the standalone features of the mantis so just to kind of give you a little bit of an introduction so the mantis q40 is one of the braille displays um and actually it is the one braille display that was developed by humanware in partnership with the american printing house for the blind it is a 40 cell braille display um it has a qwerty what's what sets it apart from other braille displays on the market is the fact that it has a QWERTY keyboard, so your standard computer-style keyboard, rather than a Perkins Brailler-style keyboard.

I personally like it because as much as I know how to type on a Perkins Brailler, and I've had focus 40 in the past still have it but I don't use it nearly as much if at all I hardly use the focus 40 anymore but I have it here and it's really neat that the the Pardon me? It's really neat that the Mantis has a QWERTY keyboard and the aim of the Mantis, there were a couple of things that HumanWare and APH had in mind when they developed the Mantis.

One of them was for students, for students, they were wanting to, allow students to develop their typing skills another thing that was really interesting when it came to the Mantis was it's not only developed with students in mind that wanted to that you know needed to develop some typing skills but also know for those who are faster typists than um you know on the qwerty keyboard than on the than using a braille keyboard so um it's really neat um it's a really neat um device, you know, especially for me being a fast typist, but not very fast at typing on the Perkins keyboard.

You know, I really love the Mantis.

It's a process at the minute, you know, and Orion are in there, but we're gonna see Seeing AI down the line.

HumanWare are developing stuff.

There's others developing for it too.

So that level of detail isn't really about the glasses themselves.

Because when I first heard about this, I kind of thought, well, why would you, you know, if you want Braille...

Because HumanWare with the BrailleNote Evolve are doing it separately, aren't they? So there's a QWERTY keyboard version coming.

So I was kind of thinking, well, surely you'd just do one or the other.

But actually...

So you're no longer waiting for a two-year process.

integration i mean one one example of this which we've talked about a number of times is rnib talking book service in the uk being available in the victor reader yes if i had five minutes with the guy from humanware and the person from rnib and i could get the three of us in a room i could probably put this together myself it's not a threat in minutes I could.

I could build this in a minute.

No, I don't need to.

Like you're waiting forever for the end of the story.

Again,

no, you're RNIB talking books and humanware, for example.

I mean, humanware used the standard API for audio book services, and RNIB just aren't using that.

Hello and welcome to the HumanWare See Things Differently podcast.

Each month, join your hosts, Rachel Ramos and David Woodbridge, as we bring you engaging interviews from guests, interaction from our one-of-a-kind distribution partners, stories that'll take you off the beaten path, current promos, shows where you can find us, and so much more.

So stick around.

Svetlana's note absolutely made my day and David's day.

So, thank you so very much.

Now, on to the exciting things that we have going on at HumanWare in August and beyond.

Some of this includes Monarch, so stick around for more information about that and a promotion we have going on in partnership with the National Federation of the Blind.

August is also a time where we think about heading back to school and because HumanWare is all in support of literacy and education, annually we send out a call for applications for a bursary, or as we call it in the U.S., a scholarship.

There were various other glasses.

HumanWare's BrailleNote Evolve was there, and that was very popular.

A lot of people were clustering around the Monarch.

So Braille displays and glasses or other sort of visual interpretation devices were among the popular things.

So I just decided to go over there and ask them what they thought I should do, not necessarily have them fix because I know they're at the convention and they're wanting to, you know, sell new devices and that sort of thing.

But they were very great.

Both the people at HumanWare first and then at APH really took a lot of time with me and said, have you tried this? Have you tried this? And I had the device with me.

And so they... you know, basically connected it to another Mantis to see if they could have one provide access to the other one.