Forget Me Not - is the future of the Braille note taker hanging by a thread?

Hi Lottie,
the Eureka lol. I had one of those in the late 80s it even had a golf game on it as I recall. Wonder what ever happened to them. Lord knows where mine went.

Oh yes. To be fair it wasn't bad when you think this was way before JAWS or anything we would now think of as AT. Did it's job

I can see the utility for lots of people, let’s disregard the privacy implications for a minute as we live in this world where you’d better just assume you’re on camera in public one way or another. For me there is something about jotting down notes that is crucial for memory encoding and retrieval, I’m already taking an idea and extracting the most saliant points on the fly and that's half the battle of learning right there. Still, that's my learning style and it has definite cons, if I forget to do the work or am distracted or tired or whatever the process suffers. It's still what works for me though and I do not want to give up braille notetaking, it's actually the most frustrating part of mobile braille support right now. I’m more optimistic android will figure it out first as the cursor is already stable while writing, they just lack the accessible apps to take advantage without really hacky workarounds like writing something in google keep then copying and pasting it out … but that's still more stable than iOS braille writing in my experience. So iOS has the apps, android has the framework. I know I could just use notetaking functions on a modern display but that adds extra steps, lacks easy formatting and doesn’t allow realtime colaboration in google docs without a computer. Anyway sorry for derailing this, it's an intriguing idea I probably won’t ever use in my own life.

If it isn't blind-expensive, it might be a little more convenient than recording things on the iPhone.
But what do I know. I've been completely off the accessibility-assessment grid for a long, long time. Currently searching the room for a spring that flew off my Perkins Brailler while I cleaned its insides. Might have to resort to magnetism.

I don't think I would like this device, as I also learn better by writing things down.
Holy diver, regarding your comment about Braille support, I would say it is very good in Android, except for apps like Whatsapp, where Talkback totally crashes when I try typing in an edit field to fast. Cursor wants to jump to send after typing the first letter, but when I navigate away and back to the edit field, and continue typing, everything is perfectly stable, and I don't experience issues with Braille anywhere else, so I don't think taking notes using either BSI or a Braille display would be problem in the least.
I am actually writing this using an ElBraille, which for being a notetaker does pretty well, and has the added benefit of being able to run Windows programs. First thing I did was throw NVDA on it instead of JAWS. As a full blown laptop alternative, it's not the best I would say, because with Windows one might not want to have to do absolutely everything from a Braille keyboard, it's actually heavier than a lot of laptops, and doesn't have the world's greatest specs. It's the 40 cell version though, and the one from 2018, so it can at least load up and run more than just Windows without becoming sluggish or freezing entirely. I plan on eventually getting my hands on a decent Windows laptop, pulling the Focus out of the ElBraille and just using that when I want Braille, but also having the laptop with a full keyboard for when I don't want to mess with it would be nice. I say all of this though, because if I were still in college, or at my previous church where I helped teach Bible classes, this ElBraille would have been great to have.
I can't speak for other notetakers. I think the days of devices running completely proprietary software are gone. With the Braillenote Touch running Android, and the ElBraille running full Windows, I don't see anything else coming along and doing quite as well. I know old BrailleNotes used to run on Windows CE, with the Keysoft suite running on top of that, but you could never get to the real Windows features. I think with smartphones being accessible, whether that be iPhone or Android, and them being able to do most of what we would do with a notetaker, if this class of devices does continue to exist, they are going to have to really continue to innovate and also make them run on as close to a mainstream platform as is possible. With all that we can now do with mainstream tech, it gets harder and harder to justify those big expenses.

Justin, I agree BSI can do this but I’m not going to be mucking about on my phone screen, checking things on the braille display, going back to the screen all while trying to keep up with a meeting or lecture. Whatsapp is kind of a cluster on android but maybe not as bad as telegram on iOS and, as far as the L Braille I’m not paying thousands of dollars for a little computer with a quarter the RAM in my laptop just for a slight efficiency boost. Not judging if that's your prefered way, I don’t know your needs but I just can't. Like for me the whole point of a braille display is I can have my phone in my pocket, maybe my other phone in my other pocket until both get their act together, maybe a laptop in my bag if I’m packing it and I can just use all the things seemlessly. As much as I love BSI it's just not built for that.

Hello,
I have the ElBraille because a friend had it laying around, wasn't using it and we just did a trade for it. I wanted it mostly for the Focus display. I agree otherwise that it would not be worth near the asking price when you can get even renewed laptops with way better specs for a lot cheaper. Had it not been for the very specific circumstances that led to me getting this thing, I would have not bought it outright. But like I said, my plan is to still get a device with much better specs. I was just saying that while specs aren't the best, the device does work decently well, and if giving a presentation or something like that, it would be nice to just bring the ElBraille along instead of the Focus plus a laptop. And while I love BSI for texting and things like that, I can see how taking notes that way might not be the best. But Braille on Android (other than Whatsapp) has been very good and stable.

People are bad enough at taking notes already! Blind people, sighted people, lawyers...honestly, this is going to make it worse! I'm really into my tech, there's no doubt about that. However, the humble brailliant BI20X is a superb product by dint of what it does not do, as much as what it does. Because it doesn't upload to the cloud, doesn't use anything online, doesn't interface with Onedrive and all that carry-on, it is entirely GDPR compliant. There are some meetings it is better not to minute so as to avoid a data subject access requeswt but where I, as a line manager, will want to keep some sort of note. My sighted coleagues are required to handwrite such notes. For my part, I am required to produce them using the Braille editor on my Brailliant, not to upload them to anywhere and to destroy them when I no longer need them. Could AI do all of that in an offline environment? Possibly, but it would be a lot harder to convince someone of that.

I also love my tech, but I feel like we're getting to a point where we're almost to dependent on it, to the detriment of other areas of our lives, and some of this stuff is getting almost to invasive.

Invasive could be taken to mean it is spying on your private life. And in that sense, yes, it is very invasive, and there's probably not much you can do about it because you are being watched by other people's tech.
Or it might be taken to mean disruptive to old ways and norms. That one you can do a lot about, in a personal or individual way. I still carry a slate and stylus in my backpack for phone numbers and labels when I go out. I wouldn't take notes with it, but I use it from time to time. I look at it as skills and time-tested tools being more reliable than delicate and extremely complicated technology. When was the last time you single-handedly manufactured a pile of rocks into a smartphone and programmed it to tell you where the edge of the path to the gate was?

We all have our own systems, our own tolerance for janky tech (I include a slate there as even at 32 I still struggle to get the damn thing lined up just right) and our own work flows … what none of us have anymore is privacy. I used to have angst about this, and don’t get me wrong I’ll still use TOR browser sometimes or signal private messenger etc etc but we’re all being spied on, we’re all on camera and there is nothing we can do about that. We can maximize the utility from it, rail against it, pretend it's not happening, those are our only choices. I say we may as well embrace the good parts, obviously for GDPR related professional situations this device is not the solution but even there it's probably just a matter of time.

I like that description, Holy Diver. I also like that psychosomatic heavy metal from the early 80s plays in the back of my mind every time I read your user name.
I have to admit that I completely misread Lottie's original post when she wrote "technology assessment." She's talking about her own assessment of particular technologies over the last thirty years. I read it the first time around as how various programs and organizations conduct an assessment on blind people who are seeking some sort of funding for technology. Probably colored the way I read most of the other posts... and why I went off on the weird tangent.

As fun as it was for a bit I wish I’d been a tad more professional when I made my account, didn’t think I’d spend so much time here but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Anyway I hope I didn’t come across as disagreeing with you, use what works and I should support that.

The slate and stylus is a janky contraption. Plus, you have to think backward to braille with it. It's just that no one that I know of has come up with a design for a keyed, braille writing device that small yet.
I like the user name. Comes from one of my favorite modern, western Taoist philosophers.

If everyone has a pin like this in a meeting, will there come a day when no one shows up to meetings ready to do anything because they are all hoping everyone else in the meeting contributes and that the AI will summarize the meeting for them later? I just have this image in my head of a bunch of executives sitting around a room with their AI pins ready to record and summarize the work that others have done... Only to realize that no one else in the room came prepared to do anything but record it with their pin as well. It's a bit far fetched I know, but I am concerned a day will come when it happens.

Every time I hear someone say that such and such new technology may be the end of braille or braille devices, all I hear is: you know who doesn't need reading or writing? Blind people! And especially deafblind people! I know that's not what folks are literally or intentionally saying, but the undertones are there and it bothers me.

I personally wouldn't want to hope that a piece of tech that has far more problems than benefits at present and which does just make things up to record something important I want to remember. There's also the sustainability issues (AI is doing a real number on the environment). I can do all the note taking myself and have a device I can read on afterwards with the notetaker. With this pendant I can... record people and then have to find other devices to go back and double check to make sure it got everything right? But also it would have recorded a bunch of unnecessary extra info because it's recording the whole meeting and has no filter like a human taking notes does. No thanks.