Perkins Brailler

Tucked in the back of a women's prison in Gatesville, 40 miles west of Waco, the Billman Braille Center is a hub of activity.

Women in white jumpsuits transcribe textbooks on computers, while others practice their skills on Perkins Braillers, typewriter-like machines that punch dots into the page.

Trishel Allen has been at the Braille Center for 11 years.

She's transcribing the graphics in a college-level anatomy book.

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.