eBraille & Elements: What’s New with the Monarch

On this episode of Change Makers, we are continuing our conversation about the Monarch, this time to learn about eBraille, and what science aspect is being added to the device.

On this episode (In order of appearance)

• Willow Free, APH’s Product Manager
• Peter Sullivan, Vice President of Duxbury Systems

Additional Links

• Meet Monarch
• Email Change Makers

Transcript

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Narrator 0:00

Welcome to Change Makers, a podcast from APH. We're talking to people from around the world who are creating positive change in the lives of people who are blind or have low vision. Here's your host.

Sara Brown 0:16

Hello and welcome to Change Makers. I'm APH's Public Relations Manager, Sara Brown, and on today's episode, we're continuing our conversation about the Monarch, this time to learn about eBraille and what science aspect is being added to the device. To talk more about eBraille and science, I have Peter Sullivan, Vice President of Duxbury Systems, and Willow Free, APH's Product Manager. Hello Willow, hello Peter, and welcome to Change Makers. Thank

Willow Free 0:43

Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Peter Sullivan 0:45

It's a great pleasure to be

Sara Brown 0:47

And before we get started, would you mind to just introduce yourselves and let our listeners know what it is that you do?

Peter Sullivan 0:54

Well, my name is Peter Sullivan. I am vice president at Duxbury Systems. That means I do code development, code writing, code debugging, a little technical support. Because we're a small company, I do a bit of office cleaning, IT support, and keep the bathroom stocked.

Willow Free 1:12

And I'm Willow Free. My pronouns are "she, her." I've been at APH for 13 years. I started as a braille transcriber and now I'm a product manager with a focus on braille and tactile graphics.

Sara Brown 1:27

And just really quick, Peter and Willow, would you mind just to share how you both got into your current roles? I mean, was there always an interest in science or STEM and that led you here? How did you all get into your current positions?

Peter Sullivan 1:41

Well, I got into it through family. In fact, Duxbury Systems belongs to my parents. So I have always had an interest in STEM. You know, I was a science major in college. But I came into the business just as a backup plan to my original career plans, really.

Willow Free 2:00

And I started as a transcriber, and I wanted a job where I did something meaningful. you know, not just shuffling money around. And so Transcriber fit that and then I always had an interest in computers, and I helped test BrailleBlaster some as a transcriber, and Larry Skutchan saw that and thought I would make a good QA, so testing software and hardware. And it turned out I was good at being a QA, so that was great. That was great that that worked out. And then that was a great role because I learned a lot about all of APH's technology products, and then from there I became a product manager.

Peter Sullivan 2:44

I should say the QA is a heck of a skill. I really respect people who can do the QA.

Willow Free 2:48

I loved it. It's a lot of fun. It's like a puzzle.

Sara Brown 2:57

And we're here to talk about eBraille. So would you like to just share what eBraille is for those who may not even know?

Willow Free 3:07

Yeah, I can take that one. So eBraille is a new Braille document type, and the idea of it is to be dynamic and include tactile graphics so that it works better with the kinds of displays that are coming out, including the Monarch. So that's the short answer.

Sara Brown 3:27

And then what was the old type, then, if eBraille is new? What was the old type, I guess? And is that old type being phased out?

Peter Sullivan 3:36

Maybe I can take that. The most common old type, I suppose, is called BRF, or formatted Braille. Is it being phased out? Not immediately. I'd like to think that more things will be available in eBraille and fewer exclusively in BRF because it's not really a very dynamic format. It's wonderful for printing if you have the size of paper for which things are designed, but it's not really very versatile beyond that.

Sara Brown 4:00

Okay, good to know. And then talk about... Why eBraille is needed?

Willow Free 4:08

I mean, it started from conversations about the Monarch. So with the BRF being static, if we didn't have a new document type, you'd have to make Braille specifically for the Monarch. And that in itself isn't a terrible problem. But then when you start thinking about all the other multiline displays, all the other new technologies coming out, now you're making Braille specifically for the Monarch. You're making Braille specifically to be printed or embossed. You're making Braille for this display, that display, this display. And so now you're either paying for multiple copies of the same Braille or you're going to end up segregating your Braille libraries by technology. And that didn't, there's not enough braille as it is. And so that didn't seem like a feasible solution. And so the idea was to look for a way to have a dynamic document type that could conform to the size of the hardware.

Peter Sullivan 5:13

And we can look at this from another angle, too, in that a nice dynamic format is EPUB, of course. So there are readers of EPUB documents available. And I believe Monarch can, in fact, read EPUB documents. At least I should hope so. However, the thing about eBraille is that the Braille is pre-transcribed, and presumably pre-proofread, so that the Braille will be correct at all times. And that's really very hard to guarantee when you're rendering any other dynamic format on a device that the braille itself is correct

Willow Free 5:49

That's a great point and that's the thing about EPUB we actually looked at EPUB as a potential solution like just doing a EPUB but really early on we decided we wanted a braille first standard for that precision because if you have a print based standard the translation would happen at the point it's being read on the hardware. Well now, if a student has their device from company A and the other student has their device from company B, they could potentially be getting different braille. Uh, they could be getting different braille. They could be getting incorrect braille. There could be parts that don't translate in that document. Like maybe they used an image of text rather than actual text. Uh, so there could be all these problems that come up and, and the teacher, the paraprofessional may not even know these issues have come up. Uh, cause the student could just be confused. Like who knows? So e-braille. I think there will be a lot of adults that embrace just using EPUBs and things like that, but eBraille, I think, is really a good benefit for the population that APH serves, which is K-12.

Peter Sullivan 6:59

I can't imagine, for example, for reading, say, a news article that you would ever see an eBraille document. It's basically going to be online on the web, and you just read it, and the transcription will be absolutely fine for that purpose. But with eBraille, where you have STEM materials, more technical materials, mixed language materials, all sorts of other trickery in Braille becomes a lot more solvable with a more rich file format specifically designed for tactile reading.

Sara Brown 7:30

So it sounds like this eBraille allows a lot more flexibility to be able to be accessed with this, especially with the Monarch? I

Peter Sullivan 7:40

In a sense, it's less flexible, I think. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's really only for tactile readers, okay? But by being focused that way, it does allow more flexibility, sure, in terms of the number of kinds of materials that you can present with perfection, really, okay? At least near to perfection is really can be hoped for, okay? You know, their line wrap issues are going to change, the formatting is going to change from device to device, but that really should all be handled quite well and the material will be reliably rendered on any device. We believe. This

Sara Brown 8:14

This is a huge undertaking. Can you talk about the partnerships involved in the creation of eBraille and what it's been like working with others in this partnership?

Willow Free 8:25

APH started just thinking about the idea and doing our best with the expertise that we have in-house. But we knew that that wasn't That wasn't ever going to be how we found the solution. You need buy-in, you need feedback from other people. And so we started talking to other organizations and getting their take on, you know, is there a political will for this sort of thing? Because it is a big undertaking, not just creating a new document type, but then implementing it and getting people to use it. um so in that process we were talking with daisy uh the daisy consortium has a lot of experience you know creating things like this creating standards working with standards bodies following these procedures and they have this international presence and so it really was like deciding to partner with daisy and then you know from there getting all of the international support and buy-in and i don't know peter if you would want to talk about how duxbury was involved really early on uh because that really was hugely beneficial because of the international knowledge that was brought

Peter Sullivan 9:38

Well I don't really i don't really understand how all that unfolded say as of about two years ago i know on very very early discussions um i was involved and i think as you explained it simply and encouraging you that this was a good idea. However, beyond that, mostly just by being, you know, supportive at least in principle of the idea and thus allowing people in non-English speaking markets to understand that they would have a path forward into this. So, you know, I think our role has been rather limited, but important, I hope.

Willow Free 10:14

Very important. Yeah, David Holliday was involved a lot in the process and seemed to know more about international Braille than anyone else that was working. We all knew our regions, but we didn't necessarily know anything about Braille outside of our regions.

Peter Sullivan 10:32

It was David's great passion to learn as much as he could about every Braille system under the sun. Yeah. Yeah, he did that.

Sara Brown 10:40

And continuing the conversation about Duxbury, can you talk about the implementation that Duxbury did of eBraille?

Peter Sullivan 10:47

Sure, and it's not complete yet. You have to understand that. And one of the difficulties is that eBraille is very, very different from what Duxbury has historically done. It's a very, very different file format from what we have. However, ultimately, what it comes down to is that we have under the file menu a Save As option, and there are various file formats that one can export, and one of them now is eBraille. For purposes of helping me to test all of this, if If you're in a print document, in fact, there's the ability to save as EPUB3, which is very, very similar to eBraille. And that's really the essence of it. We are also working with Humanware. You talked about partnerships earlier and their product, TactileView, in order to implement good quality tactile graphics in a document that is published in eBraille through Duxbury. And apart from that, we are focusing right now on the quality of the metadata, shall we say, which is to say the markup of what each paragraph represents. Is it a level one heading, a level two, or cell five in the English-speaking world heading? That's called metadata. And we're focusing on getting that really right when you're working with a BANA publication using our BANA template. So it's a limited start. Right now, we are, of course, looking forward to doing other templates. Most of the other templates in dbt are similar enough to each other that that won't be a big bridge once we have the first of them. But right now, Bena, Save As, and with the help of Human Word Graphics.

Sara Brown 12:26

And so far, what's been the biggest challenge that you faced with this?

Peter Sullivan 12:31

Do you want just one? I have four. If you're curious, one of which is the creation of the CSS. CSS is not a way I would have structured an eBraille format. I can understand why it was done. It was going to work very nicely for implementation of readers to implement things in CSS. But for me to do that has been challenging. Also, division of a document into various HTML pieces internally. I've not even done that yet. So that's a challenge that remains, and it's very hard for me to say exactly how I'm going to do it. Implementation of hyperlinks. There's no such thing as a hyperlink in paper braille. No, there is not. We can put URLs or URIs, if you will, in paper braille, and we do. But that's very different from something that has the structure of a hyperlink that you can just sort of then go onto the tactile reading surface and tap on or push a button down below or whatever and get to that material. So in the case of hyperlinks, we need to have a way to retain that in a DBT document in order to get it into an eBraille document. And that's been challenging. That one's about half done now. you do have it in the DBT documents. Willow, that's new for you. Finally, the page map to include the Braille page numbers, and this was new for me last week. I had not looked at the specification carefully enough to realize this was done, but a compatriot of mine, a contractor we have working with us, pointed this out to me. And then there's some question about what that even means, in a sense that you have a canonical rendering on paper of this document that you're referencing then. And it's very easy for us to recreate page numbers when you're referring to print pages, but Braille pages are generated. And we right now have no way of doing that. So that's yet to come. Those have been the biggest challenges, I believe.

Sara Brown 14:28

And so what testing has been done so far and what feedback have you heard from the field?

Peter Sullivan 14:34

Very little from the field. Most of our testing has been internal. And that really amounts to saving out an EPUB file and looking at it in an EPUB reader. Sometimes saving out an eBraille file, renaming it from .ebrf to .epub and then looking at it. We also have a Monarch on loan from APH and thank you very much. And so we have looked at it on the Monarch. We have tested that graphics are coming through. We have tested that the Braille is readable. We've looked for proper formats and are not quite getting that yet. And we have sent it out into the field. But right now, some of the field feedback has stalled out a little bit because of the format issue. So we're not yet quite seeing proper Braille formats. And people are not so willing to really push this thing to the limits, I think, until they're seeing that. So we have feedback from three Braille transcribers, I believe, only, and all in the English-speaking world so far. And again, that's because of the limitation in dbt, that it's really only designed right now to work with the BANA template. but hoping to move that forward really late in the summer this year. But that depends upon how quickly we can get the BANA format publication working.

Sara Brown 15:51

Okay, and then how will Duxbury's influence around the world affect the implementation of eBraille?

Peter Sullivan 15:58

Well, I think it's going to implement, hopefully push forward the adoption of eBraille. Thus, you know, the implementation, if it's adopted, then a device that's used, say, more in France than here or more in Africa than here or whatever, and we're very big in those two regions, you know, it may be more likely that we'll have readers for devices that are very popular in those regions if Duxbury supports.

Sara Brown 16:24

So what is next for eBraille? What's coming up?

Peter Sullivan 16:27

I haven't a clue. I mean, I'm hoping that more widespread adoption into devices other than Monarch is forthcoming. I'm especially hoping for on smaller, more portable and less expensive devices, even if that requires tethering, say, a Braille printer to it for output of the graphics because they typically aren't capable of rendering them. The other thing I would like to see, but I don't know that it's coming, is what I would call a direct eBraille editor. dbt is coming to be able to publish an eBraille file directly from a Braille file without a whole lot of change to the Braille production process for our customers. But there's, I think, the very high probability that there are some things that we won't put in an eBraille file that it's capable of doing that people may want to add in. Audio, for example. And that's just not a space that we're in. So a direct eBraille editor would allow someone to take that and say, well, the format's good. The metadata is good. The tactile graphics are generally pretty good, again, thanks to tactile view. But what can we do to really, really bring out all of those last features of eBraille? And I think a direct editor is probably the only way. That would be a different skill set from the Braille transcription. So it would be a matter of enhancing, really, rather than creating.

Sara Brown 17:46

Out of curiosity, When do you see that it will be complete? Or is there a completion? I mean, I'm sure it's always evolving. Because this is a long, this is a huge undertaking.

Peter Sullivan 17:59

I know, I know. I mean, I really am hoping for this year, okay? And that would be beta next month, I was originally hoping for. And it's looking as though that's probably August or September instead, due to some of these issues I've talked to you about. Complete. You know, again, I'm still hoping for this year. But, you know, I'm in software. There's nothing ever complete in software, you understand. It's always evolving.

Willow Free 18:21

Yeah, the joke that we've always made is, I said October, I didn't say which October. Fair enough. And I mean, so we're releasing the specification soon. It should be happening here in the next couple of weeks. So that'll be the publication of the final spec. But the work's not going to stop because we're going to continue having discussions about what, if any, changes need to happen next and how do those fit in. Because we obviously don't want to change things to the point we lose support that we'd already gained. But also encouraging change. that support. So getting more reading systems, opening e-braille files. I think you could use an EPUB editor. I haven't tried it, but you could, you know, if you say started in Duxbury, you got your e-braille file and then you wanted to tweak it some manually. I think you could use like a, just a regular EPUB editor to

Peter Sullivan 19:27

do that. But the one thing that's a bit difficult about treating eBraille as EPUB, of course they're similar, as you know, eBraille is essentially kind of a restricted EPUB in a sense, is validation. And I found EPUB Check to be a remarkably useful tool. When we talked about what we've done for QA, EPUB Check has been remarkably helpful, but we have to ignore certain errors. And I'm wondering if it would be possible to build into EPUB Check an eBraille mode, essentially, so that the extra metadata required from eBraille is recognized and validated and accepted. And those things that are restricted are at least warned about, because that would, I think, go a long way to helping people adopt EPUB.

Willow Free 20:09

Yes. So I'm glad you brought this up. I'm sorry I didn't think of it. But Daisy, you know, Daisy has actually built an E-Braille check layer on top of EPUB check to make an E-Braille validator. Let me ask them and I can get permission to share that with you. I don't think they, I think they would appreciate the feedback. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Let me just check with them, but I bet that would be really, really helpful for everybody. Sorry, I didn't think of it. So yeah, that's, that's a possibility there. But yeah, work's not going to stop. We definitely have plans to continue for years to come on, you know, primarily, you know, getting the support in readers, like the lower cost displays, the lower power displays, you know, part of why eBraille was, made the way that it is was for that benefit of being able to open it in a browser because a lot of people don't have ePub readers and so part of the thinking is you know you could open it in a browser and then use your screen reader and your single line display to access the eBraille you'd get all the benefits of the precision of the braille and you'd get the dynamic form or you know you get the dynamic formatting and you'd get navigation and links and you'd get at least the alt text for your tactile graphics so that's something and one thing you know that i want to do is build onto an open source browser and basically turn it into an eBraille reader sure and then anybody could use that around the world

Sara Brown 21:59

Big plans. Well, that's going to be exciting to see and just to stay on top of. Before I let you all go, is there anything else you all would like to discuss or share?

Peter Sullivan 22:09

Not really, but I mean, I really do appreciate you having me on and appreciate having Willow on as well. It's been wonderful fun. And I understand you have another topic. I'd love to sit back and listen.

Sara Brown 22:21

Of course. Yes. We are talking about the Periodic Table of the Elements. Willow. All science. That's all I'm thinking is science, which the Periodic Table has its own unique look too. So that's going to be really interesting to see how that goes on the monarch. Now, up first though, talk about the Periodic Table of Elements for the Monarch. How did that become something to put on the Monarch?

Willow Free 22:50

Yeah. Thanks. So, I mean, it really does come from how the Monarch is dynamic, right? If you want to start an argument between a group of transcribers, ask them how they would transcribe the periodic table of elements. because there's a lot of different things that you can do. There's a lot of choices the transcriber has to make today because there's just so much information. And if you include all that information while trying to maintain the spatial layout, which is so important, it's the whole point of the table is that spatial layout. So you end up having to make compromises. What aspect of the table do you emphasize? What gets cut away? There's a lot of decisions that go into making a periodic table and a lot of times what students end up using are specialized periodic tables that have been built to purpose you know you have like one copy or one version of it and then that's what's referenced so it really did start from just having a dynamic display and finally having the ability to show as much of the information as the student wants, make information available, and hopefully help the student discover the relationships that exist within the periodic table. You know, not having to be told about those relationships because they're never presented to them, but instead giving the student the ability to have that aha moment of, realizing how the atomic numbers, the atomic weights, and realizing how the groups are put together and things like that on their own. So that's the idea.

Sara Brown 24:36

And that leads to my next question is, how would that be accessed on a Monarch, an element on the Periodic Table?

Willow Free 24:44

Yeah. So right now, it's an app for the Monarch built using the SDK that we got from HumanWare. And will be made available to users of the Monarch. Once you're using it, the way we've got it set up at the moment, and we're about to enter field testing, and so this may all change some based on the feedback we get from field testing, but all of the letters of the different elements are arranged in that spatial way that users should be familiar with if they've encountered a periodic table before. And so you'll be able to notice how everything is related to the other. And then there's a cursor that goes around the element you're focused on. You can move that cursor in a lot of different ways. You can move it manually with the directional pads. You can jump around. You can bookmark and then jump to your previous bookmarks. There's a really robust find feature. So you can find by element name, by the letters, by atomic number, by atomic weight. There's lots of different ways. There's first letter navigation. So there's a ton of ways to move throughout the periodic table because it's a lot of information. And so then once you're on an element, we have at the bottom a line. And on that line is the full name of the element, the atomic number, and the atomic weight. And then you can click on any element and it opens another page with even more information. So you can get its most common state, you can get when it was discovered, you can get lots of extra information about each element. One of the features we're looking at and is going to be a part of field testing is instead of displaying the letters, in the traditional configuration, also having the option to display other information. So being able to display just the atomic numbers, just the atomic weight, just that type of information. So we've got a number of ideas in mind for how to make it even more robust.

Sara Brown 27:03

And you know, when I think of the Periodic Table from my time as a student, You know, it's not a sheer rectangle. It's a very unique shape. And what I love about the Monarch is that you can zoom out. So with this, users will be able to zoom out and see and feel what the whole table looks like. And then they'll be able to zoom in on a specific element. Is that correct?

Willow Free 27:29

We haven't implemented zooming out, but I definitely see the benefit of that. And it would be an additional way to navigate the table. So, I mean, I can see that being a feature that we implement because, yeah, you can't fit the entire periodic table on even a traditional piece of Braille paper without removing information. And so the same will be true of the Monarch, but being able to take in the entire shape is useful and then maybe even having lines representing the different groups and then you can use your cursor or point and click to go into that particular group. I really like that idea and I can see the benefit of it. So yeah, thanks.

Sara Brown 28:21

Yeah, I'm happy to contribute in any way. Now talk about how this helps spread access to science in the world of blindness and low vision.

Willow Free 28:31

I mean, the big thing is giving the student the opportunity for discovery. It's about not giving the student the answer, letting them explore, letting them find the joy that they can in the periodic table and in the idea of chemistry, and then where they take that from there. is the really exciting part. I think the Monarch really does represent that idea of discovery, because it's about finding your own tactile graphics, finding your own materials to read, and being able to use the browser, for example, to search the web and get multi-line Braille It's about finding what you want and what you're interested in as much as it is about following the curriculum as the students have always traditionally done. And I think it's in that process of discovery that the students will get a chance to really see what it is that moves them and what they want to do with their lives.

Sara Brown 29:47

Absolutely. Can you talk about in the past, have science materials been difficult to get embossed or brailled?

Willow Free 29:59

So I mean, APH does almost exclusively technical materials. We do some non-technical materials, but we do a ton of math, a ton of science. It's the most expensive, most time-consuming braille to create. A math book can cost $60,000 and take a year to make. And I mean, we have one book that we use, we're working on the BRF to e-braille converter. And one of the books we use to test with it has over a thousand tactile graphics. And those are very time consuming. It's a highly skilled position, even more so than the transcriber position, just because you also have to kind of know how to draw. And so there really are barriers to access. And I'm always, I'm a Braille person and I will always be a Braille person. But there are people that, you know, like with non-technical materials, let's say you've ordered a book, a Braille book, and it hasn't arrived yet. With non-technical materials, audio can tide you over. It's never going to be as good as having the actual Braille, but it can hold you while you wait for the Braille to arrive. Technical materials, that's not really true. Like I can listen to a story on audio. Everybody listens to audio books now, it seems. But listening to math problems, listening to science concepts, having access to charts and graphs, this is where the need for tactile material really comes into play. So, and again, it is about that discoverability. If you put up all these barriers, I could be really good at math. I could love math. Math could give me joy. But if you put up all these barriers between me and math, I may never discover that I love math. Yeah. And so the Monarch will really help with that just from increasing access. And I think eBraille will help too. Like, I think we will get to a point where we're able to submit the first volume of eBraille and then update it wirelessly and so the student as they're accessing their textbook they're getting updates they're getting additional volumes they're getting um changes corrections all those things so i think we're on the cusp of solving the day one textbook problem

Sara Brown 32:45

Oh most definitely this Monarch is is a game-changing device literally and this is how it's changing the game now How does one get this periodic table on their Monarch? You said it's downloadable?

Willow Free 33:00

Yeah, it'll be downloadable. The distribution hasn't been 100% settled. I don't know if it's something you'll have to go retrieve or if you'll get an update and it'll magically appear on your Monarch with some of the other apps that we've created. But yeah, it'll be very easy to get. And there will be plenty of announcements and things and webinars once it's available. So people will hear more about it then.

Sara Brown 33:28

And then my last question I always ask, is there anything else you'd like to share about the periodic table?

Willow Free 33:34

No, I mean, it's been a great process to work on it. It's been really exciting. We've got a lot of folks on the team that are really excited about chemistry and are invested in making the best dynamic version of the periodic table that we can. So we're excited to do field testing, get our feedback, and then get it out to the kids.

Sara Brown 33:56

All right. Peter, thanks so much for joining me on Change Makers. And Willow, thanks so much for joining me on Change Makers.

Willow Free 34:03

Thank you, Sara. And thanks a lot, Peter. I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on eBraille and other things. And it was great getting to talk with you all today.

Peter Sullivan 34:13

Thank you so much. It was a great conversation.

Sara Brown 34:15

The Periodic Table of Elements is expected to be released this fall. So be sure to follow our social media channels for more information. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Change Makers. I hope you have enjoyed it. Do you have a podcast suggestion? Be sure to send it my way by sending me an email at changemakersataph.org. And as always, be sure to look for ways you can be a changemaker this week.