Orbit

My daughter came home a while back talking about something I figured out was a refreshable braille display.   I had heard of them but hadn’t seen one but apparently she was using one at school.   She types all the time on her braille machine, but that’s standalone for the most part.   She’ll be using that a lot for school, but she’s also going to be learning other technologies as well.

A refreshable braille display lets you read braille one row of twenty characters at a time.   You read the first twenty characters and then press next and the next twenty are presented to you.   This works for lots and lots of things.   You can connect it to a phone or iPad and it will send the words there to the display.   You can have it send books or other text to it.

The iPad (phone or other tablet) sounds a bit difficult to envision.   I couldn’t picture it either as a complete solution at first but it’s coupled with something called, “Voiceover” which is an accessibility option that speaks anything and everything on the screen and changes navigation so you don’t have to see anything at all to move around.   It’s hard to explain and honestly even harder to use because we see things and can go the much faster route of going directly to what we want on the screen.   But this is a blog post topic for another day.   Suffice it to say there is great software out there to help visually impaired people.

Back to the Orbit.   My daughter talked about this refreshable braille display and I didn’t think much of it because they’re very expensive.   Except there was a new one, developed with government and foundation funding that put the orbit in the price range of a low-end iPad.   When I heard this I ordered one, sight unseen.   But it was backordered we found out.

My daughter has been waiting for the mail to come every day, asking if packages were her Orbit.   She, too, has never used one because they’re really new, but she’d used the predecessor and she was excited.   And today a package was at the front door.   I looked and excitedly told her it was her Orbit.   She and I opened the package and then she took over.

She knew how to turn it on and what to do next.   The only content on the SD card included was the user manual, which wasn’t that interesting to her, but she spelled out words and serial number to me.  When the doorbell rang I told her to go play with her friends and I’d see if I could get it figured out before she came back inside.

Three minutes later, my initial confidence in feeling I knew a few things about the Orbit had waned, because I suddenly realized I was in over my head.   I had pulled up the manual online which was all well and good since it was in printed text.   The Orbit has none of that.   It has a single row of twenty braille cells that give you every piece of information you need.   Where you are, what the menu choices are, what options you can select—everything—in braille.  And I don’t read braille.

I got the braille alphabet card and contracted braille word list out and struggled through finding the settings menu.   The online manual helped me to get to the content on the SD card, but since I didn’t know what files were there I abandoned that for a while and worked on bluetooth pairing the Orbit to my daughter’s iPad.

I’ve bluetooth paired a whole lot of devices together in my day but this one was unexpected.   It wasn’t a traditional bluetooth pairing but an accessibility/keyboard/braille reader bluetooth pairing under the accessibility settings on her iPad.   And that should have clued me into to the next thing that happened—but it didn’t.

I opened the Notes app and created a new note and then turned voiceover on.   And the little braille display started clicking and refreshing and showing the text I was hearing spoken on the iPad.   I wanted to type something in the notes app to see if I could get it to show up on the Orbit, but I couldn’t get the keyboard to appear.  And that was strange.  It was just gone.  I toggled voiceover off and then like magic, the keyboard appeared again.   I turned voiceover back on and the keyboard went away again and then it hit me: the keyboard was the Orbit.  

I pulled up my braille alphabet sheet and pitifully slowly typed my name, heard it speak the letters and then display the name on the iPad when I pressed the space bar.   And I was thrilled.   Seriously, this was cool stuff, I was thinking.    About this time, my daughter and her friends from the street came in and I called them to the bedroom where I was working.   She took over and started typing and having text appear at a much more impressive rate to the iPad.   Her friends thought it was very exciting as well.

I had to once again get her to let me have the Orbit back so I could get the other main functionality working—the ability to read books.   There was one book she wanted: Goldilocks (she was non-specific about there needing to be bears) and I had been preparing to download the book when I got the Orbit in hand.    But this, like the rest of the process, wasn’t straightforward.

Thankfully, one of the VI teachers had told me about Bookshare.org, which I registered for and then submitted a form from my daughter’s eye doctor to get her access to the content.   But I hadn’t downloaded anything yet.  I brought the SD card from the Orbit down to my computer and then  found Goldilocks (with the three bears) and a few other books.   How to download the file though?   There are settings to choose.   We had a twenty-character braille display and my daughter has started to learn contracted braille (which is sort of like shorthand braille).

I put the files on the SD card and then went back upstairs to the Orbit and put the card in.   I had looked up the key command to get to the file list on the SD card and I knew there were only five books I’d put on there which should be easy, right?   Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.   I brought my daughter and her friend back in and had her scroll (or what I thought was scrolling) through the file titles.

The thing is, my daughter is great with braille—but she’s only just finished kindergarten.   She would read off things and we’d try another option by backing out.   And then we found Goldilocks.   And we figured out how to get into the file and start reading.    And then we ran into more trouble.

You know in books where there are those words in tiny print after the title page that we never pay attention to and always skip?   They have to be there in the braille version and let me tell you, it’s a lot of text.   I finally told her I’d see if I could edit the file so we could skip straight to the story.

That was interesting.   Here’s what a bit of the file looks like:

  ,A FEW M9UTES LAT]

,GOLDILOCKS >RIV$ AT

! BE>S' H\SE4 ,%E

WALK$ "R 9 )\T EV5

BO!R+ TO KNOCK4 ,ON

! D9+ ROOM TABLE 7

?REE 9VIT+ B[LS (

PORRIDGE4',I DON'T

M9D IF ,I D1 SD

,GOLDILOCKS1 HELP+

Twenty characters across, but a lot of characters I don’t understand because they’re some standardized format for contracted braille.   So I went back and asked for the file to be formatted in uncontracted braille.    I pulled out all the extra at the beginning and it looked like this text from Cows That Type:

  ,A BIG

RED BARN SITS IN THE

COUNTRYSIDE BEHIND A

WOODEN RAIL FENCE4

,THE BARN DOORS ARE

OPEN4 ,THE ONLY

ANIMALS IN SIGHT ARE

BIRDS IN THE SKY AND

ON THE BARN ROOF4

  ,FARMER ,BROWN HAS

A PROBLEM4

  ,HIS COWS LIKE TO

TYPE4

  ,ALL DAY LONG HE

HEARS

  ,CLICK1 CLACK1

MOO4

  ,CLICK1 CLACK1 MOO

  ,CLICKETY1 CLACK1

MOO4

And my daughter loved it.  And we couldn’t get her off the Orbit for the longest time.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had spent a good bit of time playing Fortnite today.   My husband told him he had to take a break.   My son was incensed, complaining very loudly, “but I took a break when I ate lunch!”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Here’s my daughter on her Orbit.   You can hear the braille cells changing as she presses the next line button: