QWERTY

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.

Braille keyboard.

And when I create a braille file, it automatically goes to the braille keyboard.

So, I can't use QWERTY here.

Yes.

We all had our, [laughs] we all took turns with the QWERTY row.

This teacher arranged her classroom by zodiac signs, and here's what happened.

Oh, boy.

Uh, pretty much.

I'm QWER- I'm QWERTY-certified on a typewriter.

typewriter.We have Stephanie text lingo that we have to- That is- ... try to decipher It's, it's a fun game.

It is-

All right, here's a real-life example that you, um, might not be aware of, but it's on something that you probably use on a regular basis, and it has to do with the layout of the letters on the keyboards that we use to type and text with.

So most phone and computer keyboards today use what's called the QWERTY layout, and it was originally designed back in the 1870s for mechanical typewriters, where you press the button and an actual little arm went up with the letter, and it used ink to, uh, put the, put the letter onto the paper.

And one of the reason for the design was to reduce jams, um, from separating commonly used letter combinations so that the metal arms from those letters wouldn't collide [laughs] and wouldn't cause a jam in the keyboard.

So in the 1930s, an educator named August Dvorak developed the Dvorak keyboard layout.

He arranged the letters and the keys on the keyboard so that the most frequently used letters were under the strongest fingers and on the home row, and the goal was to make typing more comfortable and more efficient, and therefore faster.

And although the overall advantages have sometimes been debated, it was, it was thought to be better.

However, the QWERTY keyboard had already become the standard.

Millions of people had learned it.

Look up Blue Danube or Hungarian Dance No. 5 and you'll immediately recognize that tune.

Also what happens in this period, hmm, the first pro baseball team and the first college football game both take place in 1869, the first international rugby match in 1871, scientists invent the periodic table, and they invent the first QWERTY typewriter, like the first typewriter with a modern keyboard setup, the Q-W-E-R-T-Y, that is invented in this time period.

That's kind of a big deal, right? That's how I wrote this.

But there were still public executions in Europe and America.