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    • What are people using our devices for?

    Mary Lea has had a Canute 360 since the beginning of 2025; she often takes it into her local libraries and schools for Braille classes.

    Mary went blind later in her life and expressed how she found this quite difficult. Citing a real loss to her confidence, Mary started learning Braille as a means of growing her confidence, independence, and allowing her to read again. Mary’s Braille skills are now incredibly strong; she’s read works like Agatha Christie, The Bible, and hopes to read Dante’s Inferno if she can find a good copy!

    Mary has expressed how important learning Braille has been for her:

    ‘I can safely say that being able to read Braille has given me a huge amount of confidence, I can even read French in Braille!’

    Mary understands how important learning Braille is for education, emphasising how without Braille,

    ‘Children are let down; they’re not offered the possibility of literacy. You wouldn’t send a sighted child to school and have them come out illiterate.’

    As she’s been demoing the devices, Mary has many stories of the Canute’s impact on the people she’s shown it to:

    ‘I’ve brought the Canute in for a 76-year-old woman who’s struggled with paper Braille; she read wonderfully with the Canute; she was so excited when she read her first word.’

    Mary’s experience with the Canute has been extremely positive, and she’s expressed that getting the Canute sooner would’ve shaved at least a year off her learning time! Mary continues to use the Canute for demonstrations and workshops for visually impaired people.

    Roger Firman is a business owner, he was the chair for the UK Association of Accessible Formats, he now chairs the accessibility committee at the British Standards Institution. During his career, Roger owned the company Golden Chord, where he and his team provided a Braille music transcription service.

    Roger owns both the Canute 360 and the Canute Console Premium and has assisted Bristol Braille Technology with feedback and development for a very long time, being involved with early prototypes as far back as 12 years ago. Roger has been an incredibly vital influence in the development of BBT’s Braille machines.

    When he was working, Roger used his Canute 360 for proofreading his Braille music transcriptions; our 9-lines of Braille were extremely useful for this. Roger suggested that the Canute 360 allowed him to view material aligned like a piece of paper, making reading and proofreading easy and accessible.

    Roger has expressed how important the Canute and Canute Console are for education and employment, emphasising how,

    ‘They need to be used in the school setting, university, higher education and employment. Where there are gateways into employment, that is crucial.’

    Otherwise, Roger uses his Canute Console to explore weather and astronomy and is keen to explore more of the Console’s visual capabilities. Roger has worked with BBT to develop star maps for the Canute Console!

    Simmie Gould is a musician and mathematician and regularly uses her Canute 360 for both these skills. Music is very important to Simmie, and she has played both the piano and accordion for 20+ years. For Simmie, learning and reading music on single-line Braille devices was difficult:

    ‘It is not possible to have the music for both right and left hand on the display at the same time, and it is sometimes difficult to “match” the music for the right hand with the music for the left hand, which might be several lines lower down’.

    Simmie suggested that the Canute 360 has opened a world of Braille music previously inaccessible to her. Allowing for multiple lines of Braille and a more effective layout, Simmie can now read music for both hands at once, and the large display has made reading Braille music much more accessible.

    Simmie is also working towards a degree in Mathematics and regularly uses her Canute to help. Simmie has emphasised specifically how the ability to meaningfully read tables on the Canute has made her work much easier!

    Feedback

    We are constantly striving to improve our devices, from accessibility to sustainability we rely on your feedback to develop our machines.

    Have our devices changed aspects of your life? Tell us how!

    Tell us what you think! We’d love to hear it!