Being visually impaired, my Mantis braille keyboard changed my life

To write this article, I am using the technology that this piece is about.

It’s something like the Mantis Q40 and it’s a refreshable braille display. This device allows me to communicate with my computer via Braille.

Braille is a reading and writing system of raised dots, which are read by touching them with your fingertips. I use it because I’m blind.

I started using Braille when I was eight years old, after my eyesight became too poor to read and write in the traditional way. The Mantis Q40 is a far cry from the braille I used as a child.

The Mantis Q40 is an A4 sheet-sized device – most of the space is taken up by a QWERTY keyboard, but at the bottom is a row of 40 refreshable braille cells.

Each cell consists of eight pins arranged in two columns and four rows. These pins move up and down electronically to create different combinations called braille symbols.

These symbols correspond to letters, numbers, and punctuation marks displayed on my computer screen.

Essentially, the Mantis allows me to touch both types using the QWERTY keyboard and read the contents of a screen by touch in braille.

It’s a game changer – I can’t imagine doing my job without it

This is all a very roundabout way of saying that I have a braille line that changes under my fingers as I work, allowing me to record information as I type, or look up and read stored information.

I use it all day, every day. I couldn’t do my job at Guide Dogs without it Braille.

Refreshable Braille is surprisingly old technology, developed by a company in Germany called Papenmeier in 1975. I first came across it when I was 17 in 1982 when a machine called VersaBraille was loaned to my school.

It was a self-contained machine. You could enter data using a braille keyboard and it saved what you wrote on a cassette.

It acted as a note-taker, as you could read back stored information at any time through a small refreshable braille display. I was amazed!

Imagine being able to write braille without the very thick paper I was used to.

VersaBrailles were far too expensive for the school to buy – one teacher pointed out that you could have bought a family car for the price of one.

But it would be a utopia and I wouldn’t be lucky enough to own a Braille display until late 1993.

Until then I stuck with Braille paper, which was very thick, more like a thin card, and it wasn’t unusual to have stacks of notes two or six inches thick at school.

The first model I used cost almost £7,000 paid through government access to Work regulation. It belonged to ALVA and was a large platform with a line of braille display and nothing else. I had a standard QWERTY keyboard that was separate.

It was huge—probably three times the size of the Mantis and incredibly heavy. Definitely not portable.

Since 1993, I’ve worked in several customer-facing roles where I would have struggled without Braille.

There are people who use text-to-speech software: technology who reads aloud what is on the screen. While I take my hat off to them and their ability to decipher the different voices in their headsets and stay sane, I couldn’t use that.

I have worked for the past six years Guide dogsa charity close to my heart because I have a beautiful German Shepherd cross Golden Retriever guide dog named Elsa. She is my seventh guide dog since I got my first in 1989 and I couldn’t live without her.

I work on the ‘Guide Line’ as a canine health consultant, speaking with service users and volunteers and advising on health issues with working guide dogs, retired dogs or puppies in training.

This is where my Mantis Q40 comes into its own.

It’s a totally versatile package that has opened up the written world in ways I could never have imagined

Unlike the other braille displays I’ve used, which were much larger and less portable, the Mantis is a Bluetooth QWERTY keyboard with a built-in, refreshable braille display, which ergonomically means a less cluttered and more comfortable experience.

It is an all-in-one solution, whereas previously people with a visual impairment had to carry both a traditional keyboard and a separate braille device.

While speaking to callers, I often need to look things up on my computer. If I’m listening to someone speak and want to read information at the same time, a screen reader can’t talk to me at the same time, so my Mantis keyboard allows me to read the information on the screen while I’m on a phone call.

It also means that when I’m taking notes or recording information during a call, I can quickly check the accuracy of what I’ve typed by reading it back in Braille.

It’s a game changer – I can’t imagine doing my job without it.

It’s not cheap at around £2,500. Fortunately, again using the Access to Work scheme and with the help of my employer, I was able to get one.

I’ve been lucky enough to have one ever since and it does all the things I hoped it would. It fits nicely in my backpack, so I take it with me everywhere.

An added bonus is that it also connects to iOS devices such as my iPhone. It means I can access thousands of books on the Kindle app and read them in braille – something that blind people could only dream about until about 10 years ago.

I even used it to read a poem at the service when my father sadly passed away in 2021.

It’s a totally versatile package that has opened up the written world in ways I could never have imagined.

I’m a real proponent of braille and would recommend that any blind or partially sighted person who thinks they could benefit from braille to go ahead and learn it.

In my ideal world Blind kids would learn it all in school. For me, it’s the difference between being read to and actually reading to myself.

There’s great technology out there for people with visual impairments and I’m lucky enough to own just one piece of it – it really changed my life.

Visit the Guide Dogs tech hub for more information: www.guidedogs.org.uk/techhub

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