Celebrating Braille Literacy Month, we hear from Olga Espinola:
��to see the quadratic formula in braille on a braille display for the first time�.
Dave Williams:
�The moment for me that was most powerful was when��
Elizabeth Whitaker:
�Having it there at your fingertips and all of those great features that come with it is just a game changer�.
On FSCast, episode 266.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
So hello, and welcome to FSCast Episode 266 for January 2026. I'm Oleg Shevkun, and normally I like to begin each episode with a few words of introduction. But I'm afraid there is no time for an introduction today. We've got a full episode. We've got two exciting interviews about braille because we are celebrating Braille Literacy Month, but also about personal development, accessibility, mentorship, and many other things. So I do hope you will enjoy the next 50 to 55 minutes, but I do need to pass on a message from our marketing department.
Within the next month or two, there will be some changes in the names of our product editions. The reason for those changes is to make our product editions more understandable. Let me emphasize that these changes have nothing to do with product pricing or features.
So as of now, Vispero is offering the following product editions:
� First, we have the Work Edition, and that used to be called Professional. And as the name suggests, it is designed for use in a work environment.
� Then we have Access Edition, and that is what was previously known as Home Edition.
� And finally, we have our Personal Edition. That's what used to be called Home Annual.
So once again, the three editions are Work, Access, and Personal. And these changes do not affect pricing or product features.
And of course, there'll be a product update coming in February, and we'll be saying more about that on our next episode in February.
Olga Espinola has been working for Freedom Scientific, currently Vispero, for the last 25 years. Recently, she announced her retirement as of January 2026. I remember listening to the cassette manuals for the Braille �n Speak that Olga produced back in very early '90s. And I was absolutely amazed at her gift of teaching and explaining. Little did I know then that I would have the privilege of interviewing Olga on FSCast. So Olga, welcome to our virtual studio.
OLGA ESPINOLA:
Thank you, Oleg. I really appreciate the opportunity.
OLEG:
You've got an interesting first and last name. And after working with you for quite a few years, I know you're Cuban. How did you get to the United States?
OLGA:
Well, first of all, my name Olga is actually Russian. Somehow a lot of Cubans adopted that name. A lot of Spanish-speaking people did. I'm not sure why exactly. My last name actually is Esp�nola, with stress on the �I�. And it has to do with European ancestry. My mother's ancestry is from Spain in Seville and that area, Castilian. And my father is from Sicily in Italy. And so somewhere along the way, his name, which started out as Spino, got an E at the beginning and then eventually got LA after it and became Espinola in Cuba, don't ask me how. As to how I came in to the States, it's a very interesting scenario, because I have to take you back to my birth, really. I was born totally blind, but then had an operation in Cuba in 1957 or 8, where I started to see. And I got to the point where with eyedrops, I was able to color in a coloring book, cut paper dolls out, was pretty good at it. Had good eye to hand coordination.
I was able to see the Little Dipper in the sky and chase the moon and things like that. Even drive a little scooter that I had around the backyard. We had a huge backyard. But Castro came into power in '59, and then we had politics get in the way. And for the next three years, my parents had to struggle with trying to get my medication, which had come from the US. But without medication daily, my eyes really deteriorated. It took three years to get out of Cuba on a medical visa. And then that landed us in Boston, Massachusetts, where at Mass Eye and Ear, which is one of the leading eye hospitals even today, they tried to fix me and could not. So now I'm five and a half, six years old, and my parents had to be told, "You have a completely blind child." I didn't even have light perception at that point, zero.
And that's how I've been ever since. I am now, will be turning 70 in September, and I don't have a problem saying that, because I've lived a very productive life. We were very fortunate that we landed in Boston because of the medical situation. And the Mass Commission for the Blind stepped in, and the person who was given our case happened to speak Spanish. She was able to sit down with me, my parents, and said, "You have a normal child, and you can do two things. You can tie her up, not let her do anything. And then her brother," who is seven years older than I, "He's going to have to take care of her when you're gone, and you're not going to be here forever. Is that what you want?" And so they had to say, "What do we do?" They were starting a pilot program in Boston at the time, long before the term mainstreaming became a thing.
And they said, "We're having this program here where we're having some blind children like your daughter introduced into a regular school setting with sighted children, where she will spend some time in a special classroom. She'll learn braille. She'll learn how to type, because obviously she has to learn how to type in order to interact with the sighted world since she can't really hand write." But first, she doesn't know English, so we have to immerse her in English. And here again, this was before any English as a second language program or concept even existed, and at least not at that time in Boston. So my parents took it on and said, "Okay." I was put into a kindergarten class and the teacher was told that, "I know this is weird, but here's a kid. We think she's really smart, but she doesn�t know even how to say hello in English, so figure out a way to teach her." And so she would do things like show me a pair of scissors. And of course I would touch the scissors and say, "Oh yeah, tijeras. I know what that is. Oh, scissors? Okay, I got it." That is basically how I started learning English so that when I got to the first grade into this setup with the special classroom where I would learn braille and so on, I already knew enough English to be able to function in that environment. I knew what mother, okay, mother is madre. Yeah, I understand that word. Then it was a question of showing me that in braille, and somehow I picked it up very, very quickly. This is how non-technology we're talking about: we had flashcards, and each flashcard had a braille word on it, dot five and an M, that was explained. And we had a slate and stylus. You had to literally understand that you were writing your braille from right to left, but then you had to turn it around and make it be left to right, and that's how you'd read.
I learned braille very fast, and I started somehow learning math very fast, so that by the time I was in the second grade, all the other kids, the sighted kids, were learning two plus five, oh, let's see, count on your fingers. Yeah, that's seven. The special ed teacher somehow saw that I could do more than that. And again, without really any technology, we had very archaic tubes with braille dots on them that represented all the digits. She had me doing four digit columns of addition and even subtraction. The kids weren't even at subtraction yet. And I didn't understand how come they're just doing that, and I'm doing this. I would take my little friends at recess time and say, "You can do better than two plus five, and I'm going to show you how." And that is how my whole training teaching thing began, where I would take others who I thought might be able to do something I had figured out how to do, and then taught them.
And that then extends all the way to my sophomore year in high school, where there�s now a very different scenario. Obviously now I speak English very well, and I'm reading a lot of books and so on, but here comes geometry, and they wanted to give it to me on tape. And I said, "There's no way you can do geometry on tape. I need tactile diagrams." And I insisted and won the case in the city of Boston against the Boston Public Schools, and they had to provide me with a math book that I could read in braille with tactile information. And that's yet again, another scenario where I found myself having to advocate for myself.
By the time I got to college, it's now 1975 timeframe, there was no reasonable accommodation. That stuff came a lot later. So here it is, 1975. I'm at Wellesley College for my undergrad degree. I ended up doing a major in psychology and minored in math and music. I wanted to major in math, but I couldn't because the textbooks just couldn't keep up.
I had people writing up my textbooks chapter by chapter as I was attending class and it reached a point where it just didn't make any sense. It didn't work out. We're talking about no technology at my disposal to be able to function. And I was the only blind person at Wellesley. There was no students with disabilities office and none of that. Again, I found myself having to advocate for myself, but I was very, very fortunate in a way, because it taught me some really hard lessons.
When I left Wellesley in 1979, I landed a job teaching math. My dream job, teaching. It almost didn't matter what I was going to teach, but teaching math, a subject that I adored, even though I couldn't major in it. So for the next couple of years, I taught math to sighted kids at the secondary school level in Worcester, Mass., and again, with no technology at my disposal of any kind. And so it did not work out. The contract was not re-offered to me in 1981. I understood it, but then it was, �Okay, my life is over. I have no way to move forward now.� This is all I ever knew how to do is teach. How do I move forward now?
I was fortunate that here again, a friend of mine in Worcester said, "You have the math aptitude. I think you can maybe work for us at the bank." And vice president of the savings department at that bank took me on and did mentoring. And here's where the mentoring and mentorship from me, to me, really makes a huge difference in my life.
It was at this time, now we're talking '83, you started to have some computers trying to work with, it wasn't even a term, access technology. It was, you've got to try to make the Apple IIe maybe work for a blind person. And it was David Holladay, who is now deceased. He was one of the pioneers. David Holladay and his wife, Caryn Navy, who now works for Duxbury Systems, they were the ones that started out.
And since there were no training manuals, you didn't even have the cassettes that you started talking about in this interview with me. None of that existed. What existed was somebody like Olga saying, "How does it work? What does it mean?" And I was fortunate that they were very happy to share the information with me. And guess what I did with whatever it is they shared? I put it forward to everybody else I could. It was just natural for me to say, "Oh, I just learned about X."
And all we had at that point is these messaging boards. The internet was very, very crude. There was a device called the VersaBraille, which was a cassette driven braille display. Very heavy, but I trundled it back and forth from the bank to the Worcester Library where there was a giant Kurzweil machine. And the Kurzweil machine was the scanning device that somebody had come up with, Ray Kurzweil.
Again, no manuals, no training materials, just figure it out. Does this work? Does that work?
I was very lucky that the bank said, "Yeah, we want you to do mortgage calculations for our customers and tell them what their amortization is going to look like and so on. But gee, if you could just use VisiCalc on the Apple, it turned out that did not work very well, even though we were able to do some things with the Apple, with braille, this VersaBraille connected to it. It was very primitive.
But by 1984/5 timeframe, the IBM personal PC came out. The bank got one, and again, we sat down with it. There was now a different set of people besides Holladay doing a lot of work with this to try to get DOS working for the blind in some way. And they did. And it was, again, by today's standards, very primitive, but suddenly there was Lotus 1-2-3, and I was able to work with it.
And because I understood just intuitively what it all was about dealing with tables, a spreadsheet, I'd never seen one, but because of my aptitude with math, I understood conceptually what it was about. And here again, the first question I asked when we got Lotus 1-2-3 talking at the bank was, "Wait a minute, how does it know the date?" And of course, the person with me said, "I don't know. It doesn't matter, does it?" And I said, "Yes it does. I need to know why it's doing it. How is doing it?" And again, once I found out, I shared my knowledge to any blind person that I could.
And in those days, we're talking '85 timeframe, we had newsletters every month that you could send out to people. And so I would often write little, today it would be called blogs about, "Here's what I learned this month." So my name got known as a result of that. Oh, there's Olga again, giving us more information about something.
And over time, as things changed, now I got headhunted out of the bank to Honeywell where they said, "We're going to turn you into a programmer." And I said, "I don't know anything about programming." They said, "That's okay. We'll teach you." And they did just that. Again, here's another mentor teaching me programming concepts that I never thought I'd be getting into any of that. So what did I do with that again? I said, "Well, I've just learned something about C++..." It wasn't even C++ yet, it was just C programming. And so again, I started sharing that information with other blind people who then said to themselves, "Wait a minute, she's doing programming. Maybe I could learn that."
So somehow people I've never even met to this day, every once in a while, someone says, "I read your manual about whatever. You taught me how to use the whatever." It's very rewarding to me, because to me that's what it's ultimately about, is mentoring and getting mentored.
As time grew on after Honeywell, I ended up working for New England Telephone for almost five years, and now it's 1992. And I lost that job due to a downsizing, but it was really more about the fact that now we had Windows, and I was still using DOS because that was the only thing really available to me. Nobody had yet cracked the Windows problem. And it was ultimately Ted Henter's JAWS that won the day with that. Again, very limited information at the time. And by this point, I am now an independent consultant teaching other blind people who were trying to get employment or were already employed, but were about to lose their jobs because here's this Windows thing, how do we even do it? And I wrote manuals. And so my name was known that way.
Somehow a person named Matt Ater got my name, and he was at that point doing work for the IRS. This is now approaching 1997 timeframe. And Ted Henter and JAWS had really started to take off and become the way to go.
So it was a question of using Ted's training tapes, however crude they may have been, they were great because Eric Damery and Ted Henter sat there and pretty much taught you what you needed to know to learn enough about JAWS. And I learned it in about a week-and-a-half, so that I could become one of the trainers that Matt Ater used for the 500 people that were working at the IRS around the country who needed suddenly to learn this new thing, this JAWS with Windows and Microsoft Word and Excel and all that that was pretty new to them at that point. I went around for about six cities is that I did. There were other trainers as well. Most of us blind people who were then doing training, similar to what I was doing as independent consultants themselves around the country. And who knew that years, years later, Matt Ader would be employed by the Sparrow and we would come full circle knowing each other through this company.
I got my master's degree in technical communications in 1998, and that taught me a lot about technical writing. I had already written all these manuals, so I already had a handle on how to do that. Somehow instinctively I understood what was needed for someone trying to, here's a new piece of software that I need to figure out. How do I even begin getting a good source of information laid out in a very constructive way where I could just flip to, "Well, I already know what a file is or a file manager is, but how do I do it with this program that I'm working with?" Being able to find things quickly in a manual is really important. And a lot of manuals fall short even today with things like that. So I did that for quite a while, got myself a job with Access Technology Services in California. Going out in the field and saying, "Okay, is this program accessible? Could a blind person do this job? If not, why not? Can we make it work?"
And of course, JAWS being JAWS with all its flexibility, even in the early days, this is now, I'm talking 2001, 2002 timeframe, we already had the scripting well in hand. So I started teaching myself how to do that so that I could then be able to go out in the field and say, "Yeah, we can make this accessible." Attended a class at Freedom Scientific, a scripting class that they had at that time. It was a five-day course. And asked a lot of questions about, "I noticed you don't have a switch statement, you don't have case statements, you don't have this, why is that?" And so I was immediately called the troublemaker, and �she's asking a lot of questions about our scripting�, but somehow that put a bug in certain people's ears. And I did a presentation with the company I was working with at the time, this is 2002 now, at CSUN. Eric Damery saw me and pretty much headhunted me out of that job and asked me to come to Florida. And I said, "Well, I'm not sure I belong in the test department, but maybe I belong in the scripting department."
So I ended up in the scripting department early 2003, that was when I joined Freedom Scientific, and immediately was taken on by someone who is still with us, James Datray, who is a very, very, very smart engineer. And at the time, James was told, "Show this person the scripting stuff on the internal side that she couldn't possibly know on the outside." And so again, here comes another mentor to me. And that's just how James started teaching me and allowed me then to ask questions. And so for the next several years, seven and a half about, I pretty much handled all the office applications and was able to provide a lot of information to the people who were doing testing at that time, about how things work with Excel, with whatever, all the office products.
I had a lot of help internally from engineers on the internal side of things. But the scripting part I handled pretty much, after a certain point with James, I pretty much handled that until in 2010, Eric said, "I really need you in the test department because you have all these language skills, these braille skills, and it seems like you can work with different languages." And now math wasn't even a thing at that point because we didn't support math in any way. So I said, "Okay, I'll come to the test department and see if I can help out." And I immediately started doing a lot of work with writing test procedures. And some of the testers, as with everything else, said, "You know what? I didn't know anything about Excel until I had to deal with these test procedures. They're very long, but boy, did they teach me things I didn't know."
So I found myself over the years going all the way back to when I first came to the States, and then found myself not being able to teach after that first job where I was teaching math and it didn't work out because no technology. All the way to this where people were still learning something from me. And that is my reward to teach others and eventually have them come back and say, "Okay, you probably didn't know about this, but you can do this." And that's my reward. When the student teaches the teacher, it is the most rewarding thing in the world when you find that.
It wasn't until 2014 or '15 that we finally introduced math. And the very first time that I saw under my fingers the quadratic formula on a braille display, I literally cried because I had not touched it in as many years as when I left teaching. And when I left teaching those kids and the secondary school level back in 1981, it was braille hardcover books that I was using, so I could see it that way.
But to see the quadratic formula in braille on a braille display for the first time was such a breakthrough. Now that we have MathCat available to us, which is again, a far cry from where we even started with math support for JAWS. Now that we have the math editor where you can literally input braille and have math come out on the other side, these things were just not even options for someone like me. And the fact that we've been able to do this, and that I have pushed and pushed to make sure that we keep doing it.
And so to me, it's very important to keep my hand in as my retirement comes into being here starting in '26, that I really am not retiring. I still am very actively using JAWS. I will forever be using JAWS and contributing to anything related to the work that Vispero does to continue empowering the independence of blind people around the world. And that includes math and most definitely includes braille.
OLEG:
Now, I'm not sure you noticed this, but when recording this interview with Olga, I asked her just one question. And in response, I got this fascinating story. I was sitting there and listening and not wanting to interrupt. There were some more questions and some more things that Olga shared. Unfortunately, we do not have time to play them on this episode, but here I'm going to ask for your feedback. If you would like to hear more of Olga's interview on our February episode, then please write to [email protected]. And if I get 10 responses from you, so basically if 10 people let me know that, "Yes, I'm interested, I'd like to hear more," then yes, we'll play the rest of that interview on our FSCast for February.
And also, if you have any additional questions or comments for Olga, please send them in as well. That address once again is [email protected].
OLEG:
It is often said that a good journalist must also be a good runner. That's because after an event or a conference, or even a seminar, sometimes you've got to run fast to catch up with a celebrity or a speaker or an interesting guest, just hoping to get a short interview. And that's exactly the feeling I had a few days ago when Dave Williams of Dot Incorporated was doing a webinar with Elizabeth Whitaker. Well, thankfully I didn't have to run. We could just schedule a recording. So Dave, thank you for joining us on FSCast and for the fact that I did not have to run to catch up with you.
DAVE WILLIAMS:
That's all right, Oleg. I'll take care of the running. It's wonderful to be with you. Fantastic podcast, and looking forward to our chat.
OLEG:
Now, a little disclaimer is in order here. Last year we spoke on several occasions about the Monarch, the famous multi-line tactile display from HumanWare and APH. JAWS works very well with the Monarch, and in fact, it has been the trailblazer for our multi-line braille support. However, we at Vispero work with several braille display manufacturers, and one of them is Dot Inc., represented here by Dave Williams. Now, having got that out of the way, let me ask you the main question. Dave, how did you meet your wife, and what was the role of braille in that?
Dave Williams:
Okay. Oh, well, I mean, I can't believe there's anybody in the world who's not heard this story already. I am a braille reader, as is my wife. And one of the things we love to do together is play Braille Scrabble. So if you've ever handled a Braille Scrabble board, you'll know the tiles, they fit into little squares on the board so that you can read them by touch without moving them. And they've got the print characters on there as well. So it's a very inclusive experience, and we love playing Scrabble and having a chat. And so my then girlfriend, this is 15 years ago, I would say, Valentine's Day coming up, I thought maybe it's time I pop the question. And so I wrote the question in braille on our Braille Scrabble board, and I put the board back in the box. And next time we came to play a game, which happened to be Valentine's Day, my wife took the board out and said, "Oh, there's some tiles still on here." And she went to remove them. I said, "Oh, I think it might say something." And she read the question, "Will you marry me?" And proceeded to rummage in the scrabble bag to find the letters needed to compose her answer, during which time I realized that I had used both letter Y�s in my question. There were only two letter Y�s in a standard set of Scrabble, and I'd used both of them, so I was cursing myself. And eventually Emma wrote her answer, which was blank-E-S. And Scrabble players will know that the blank can substitute for any letter. So yeah, that was a while ago, and I've been dining out on that story ever since. People seem to really resonate with it. Emma said she could have also written, "Okay."
OLEG:
Wow, that is so cool. So how many years have you been reading braille?
DAVE:
Well, it's that question of, have you been reading braille all your life? And of course, not yet." So yeah, I was taught braille at a specialist school for the blind when I was a child, maybe age five or six. And do you know, I hated it. I really resisted and resented learning braille. I just thought it was weird. We would say othering now, I think. It was something that felt to me that was perhaps Victorian, that was out of date. We had lots of technology that could speak to us very quickly. So why on earth do we need to feel these little patterns of dots under our fingerprints? And so I put braille down for a while. You'll hear from some blind people about how they loved taking braille books to bed and reading in the dark and all this stuff. I really didn't. I listened to the radio or audiobooks or whatever. And it was only as an adult when I came back to braille that I realized the value and the power that braille gives us.
When I got into work, I recognized that actually braille is a very powerful tool for proofing documents, understanding layout, for delivering presentations, making notes, accessing customer information, all of that. But the real epiphany, I suppose, was when I became a parent and I wanted to read the bedtime story with my son. And audiobooks are wonderful. And Stephen Fry and all the other audiobook narrators do a fabulous job. They can really take you away somewhere else. But as a parent, I felt as a dad, it was my job, my duty, my responsibility to read the braille book with my son and to have those moments together. And I've actually got some audio recordings of when I used to do that. And in one, he asks me, "What's a shadow?" And I'm sure psychologists would make much of this, a blind dad explaining to a sighted child what a shadow is, but I did explain it. And the point here is that's where you build your relationship. When you're able to answer questions from your kids, they can't ask an audiobook a question. Maybe in the future with AI, they might be able to. But having that interaction, being able to do all the silly voices yourself, being able to find your own voice to dynamically adjust your reading speed, understand how words are spelled and how the punctuation works, and just be very present in the moment, I realized that braille allowed me to do that and to be more like other parents, like sighted parents. And I realized that we cannot allow braille usage to diminish or decrease. We have to get out there and show everybody the value and the power of braille, because I want other blind parents like me to have that same opportunity and that same joy of reading with their kids and being able to code and study music and languages and all the other things that we know braille's great for. But that was the moment, Oleg. It was becoming a parent and the bedtime story.
OLEG:
Just out of curiosity, was that hard copy braille or a braille display?
DAVE:
First, it was hard copy braille when I could get those books. So here in the UK, we have a wonderful service called the ClearVision Project, and it's a lending library of children's books. And what they do is they get the original book print title, and then they insert clear plastic pages between the print so that you can have a shared reading experience. Either a blind parent with a sighted child, or a blind child with a sighted parent, or any combination. And so that was where we started and we read things like Thomas the Tank Engine, and The Gruffalo, and the Mr. Men, and Winnie-the-Pooh, and Paddington, all those sorts of stories for younger children. And then of course, as my son's reading tastes developed and he wanted to access longer books or books that perhaps hadn't made it into hard copy braille, then I switched to using electronic braille. So I would get the family iPad and I would link that with my little single line braille display. And I read quite a lot of Harry Potter that way, actually.
OLEG:
When you switched from a paper braille to a single line, traditional braille display, did you notice any degradation of like reading speed or comfort level?
DAVE:
I think it is harder to read from a single line braille display than hard copy, because it's more difficult to read ahead and to feel how much is left on the page to move your left hand down to the next line. So there's a real skill, I think, to reading from a single line braille display. And obviously the longer that single line is, if you've got a 40 or even maybe even an 80 cell braille display, you can improve on your reading fluency. But all that button pushing and scrolling, and just not being aware of your context, can be quite limiting.
OLEG:
Do you remember your first experience with any multi-line braille or tactile electronic device?
DAVE:
So about 10 years ago, I heard about a guy down in Bristol who was trying to develop a multi-line braille display. And I thought, "I've got to go and check this out." And I was working in assistive technology at the time. So I also, of course, had a professional interest, but also just personally wanted to get my hands on and figure out how would I use this, and is it ready for prime time, and what does that feel like? So I went down to Bristol and I met Ed Rogers who developed the Canute, which is a nine line, 40 cells per line device.
It's a tabletop device, and you can put braille files on a SD-card and plug those in or on a USB stick and read those on the Canute. And it just really blew my mind that suddenly things like simultaneous equations in math, multi-part harmony in music, a table like sports results, those sorts of things could now make sense on a braille display in a way that they just hadn't previously. And I remember spending many hours reading from that device and thinking how great it was that I could feel the shape of the paragraphs, and I didn't need to refresh at the end of every line.
OLEG:
Now the Dot Pad and the Dot Pad X are a major advancement, of course. These are full-fledged braille displays, these are quiet, these are fast, these are compact. And yet at the same time, they're a bit limiting. I mean, it's just 20 cells or 20 characters per braille line. Do you experience that limitation? Are you limited by 20 cells?
DAVE:
Sometimes the question is asked, "What's the best braille display?" And the answer comes back, "Well, it's the one you have with you." And in your description there, you described Dot Pad as being compact, and it really is. It weighs just two and a half pounds, measures 11 by nine inches, has a 300 cell refreshable tactile graphics and multi-line braille display, plus an additional 20 cell braille reading line. And so on Dot Pad, I can typically, from a screen reader, have around eight lines of braille visible at any one time. So that in reality translates to 160 braille characters, which is double anything that I typically would've had previously with an 80 cell display. And I can't carry an 80 cell display in my bag, but I can certainly carry a Dot Pad in my bag. So straight away, I've got double the braille in something that's much more portable.
The second thing to say about Dot Pad is, of course, it doesn't just show multi-line braille, which is great, obviously in reading apps like Kindle and so on, but it can also show tactile graphics. So Dot have the canvas app, Dot Canvas, which allows to create graphics or share and access a public library we call Dot Cloud of tactile graphics. So last year, for example, I did a bit of traveling for work and pleasure. And the team put together some tactile maps that I was able to feel. I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and I was able to feel a render of that structure before I did that climb, and various flags of different countries. And so all these tactile experiences that were previously unavailable to me are now possible thanks to a product like Dot pad.
OLEG:
There are several products now in the market that provide braille or tactile multi-line functionality. Yet both The Monarch and the Dot Pad displays use the dots from Dot Corporation.
DAVE:
Yeah, Dot Inc is the original equipment manufacturer of this new type of electromagnetic braille cell that is used in Dot Pad, but is also available to third parties to build products around. So the Monarch uses the Dot Cell in that device. There are 480 cells there. The big breakthrough, and I think the important thing for everyone to understand is that historically with single line braille displays, the part that you're touching, the cell, is actually only the end of quite a long component that stretches back inside the device. Whereas the cells that are manufactured by Dot, they're like little Lego bricks. So they can plug next to each other or above and below each other in any configuration. So when I've been at Dot's HQ in Seoul, South Korea, where Dot Pad is assembled, I've felt devices with 768 cells. And theoretically, any size braille display is now possible thanks to these cells.
So they're in the Dot Pad, they provide quite a solid feeling braille dot. When the pin is in the raised position, it's locked. So the braille is quite firm, quite solid to the touch. You don't get that springy, spongy sensation that perhaps we used to get with more traditional braille technology. And the technology's really evolved. Some listeners may remember Dot Watch from about 10 years ago. This was Dot's first foray into the world of refreshable braille. This was a wearable full cell braille device. And I think it's fair to say that Dot were really learning about how to make a braille cell at that point. And one of the decisions that they took quite early on was to use a cell protector. So this is a sheet, some people call it a membrane, or a skin, that sits over the pins. And this prevents dust, dirt, moisture, grease from getting inside the braille cells.
And that results in a very high degree of reliability. We know from the numbers around the Monarch how reliable those cells have been. So that's always been a challenge for refreshable braille. You have all these little pins going up and down. And of course, over time they gather cruft from the environment. Children sometimes use these devices, maybe haven't washed their hands or whatever. And even if you have got clean hands, you're constantly shedding skin particles anyway, and so when you're running your fingers over your braille display, inevitably those cells eventually are going to run into difficulties. So this cell protector, I think was a really bold decision, quite controversial at the time. Initially, folk were like, "Wow, we're not sure about this." But actually, once you start reading from that surface, you do notice the cell protector for the first few seconds, but after a minute or two of reading, it just becomes normal.
OLEG:
Do you have a feeling like you have to get used to that new braille? I mean, I don't have much experience with the Dot Pad displays. I do have some experience with the Monarch, and I should say it takes quite a bit of retraining for those of us who have been reading braille longer. It compares to thermoform. You remember those plastic sheets of braille, something like that. So you have to retrain yourself. Is that fair, or do you think I'm painting too bleak of a picture?
DAVE:
Braille is a very personal experience, isn't it? And everybody reads in slightly different ways, with different numbers of fingers and exerting different amounts of pressure on the dots. We know that faster braille readers tend to use more fingers. They tend to use a lightness of touch. The European Blind Union Braille Working Group have published some information about braille fluency that you can find on the livingbraille.eu website. And all of this points to the fact that we are quite resilient as braille readers to reading from different types of device, different surfaces, from medication or board games, or I mentioned those books from the ClearVision Library earlier on. I think initially when you start using the Dot Pad, you are going to notice that it does feel different. As I said, the dots are solid. They have a cell protector over them.
So yes, it does feel different. Same with the Monarch. I don't think that difference is insurmountable. I honestly think that given a few minutes of reading, you just become more focused on the content. I certainly find it easier to switch between a traditional braille display and a Dot Pad or a Monarch than I would say to change speech synthesizer because it's still braille. It's still the same braille code that you're familiar with. Whatever you've set in JAWS, uncontracted or contracted braille, the way in which headings are represented and other type forms, all of that stays the same. You haven't got to relearn braille even though it's a different type of device.
OLEG:
So some of our listeners might be familiar with the original Dot Pad. How is Dot Pad X different?
DAVE:
Dot Pad X uses the D3, third generation dot cell. So it's a lot faster to refresh compared with the D2 second generation dot cell that's currently available in the Monarch. So you'll find that the eight lines refresh pretty instantaneously, and the power requirements are slightly less. I think it might even be slightly quieter, although I've not measured that. So the technology continues to evolve, huge amounts of investment in developing this and I'm sure in the future it's just going to get better and better.
OLEG:
The engine behind what is shown on the braille display is the screen reader. And in that webinar, Elizabeth was showing us what JAWS could do with the Dot Pad X, do you as somebody who works for the Dot Inc, what was the most fascinating there?
DAVE:
I really appreciate the opportunity to work with Vispero's training division, and Elizabeth did a wonderful demonstration in the webinar. The moment for me that was most powerful was when Elizabeth demonstrated using Split Braille with FSCompanion. So she brought up some instructions on how to work with styles in Microsoft Word, for example. And she set up the Split Braille so that FSCompanion was on the lower part of the multi-line display, so she had her instructions there. And then her document in Microsoft Word was visible on the upper part of that display. So that is a huge difference, I think, compared with anything we've had previously when it comes to learning new things, learning how to use an application. I can think of other training scenarios where that might be helpful. Think about someone who is deaf-blind learning a new skill, where they've always had to take their hands away from one thing and go to something else. So that seems to me to be hugely powerful. And then of course, we've got the modes in JAWS, the cropped mode that allows us to show tabulated information. So if you're in a table or a spreadsheet with JAWS on your multi-line braille display, you can feel how those columns line up, which could be hugely valuable in employment settings if you need to work with tabulated data in a table or a spreadsheet. So very powerful multi-line braille support in JAWS with lots and lots of different use cases. And if somebody says to you, if you're trying to make the case to your employer or you're trying to get some funding for a multi-line braille display, and somebody asks you, "Why do you need multi-line?" The short answer is context. That's the key word, I think, context, being able to understand the information that you're on and how does that relate to information around you above, below, or from another application.
OLEG:
Now, Dave, you're also the founder of a major organization that is involved in braille advocacy. Can you talk about that?
DAVE:
In my efforts to spread braille usage for any blind person who can benefit from it, I also have been fortunate enough to be involved in establishing and chairing the Braillists Foundation. And I appreciate in the United States the word braillests means braille producer, but where I come from in the UK, braillest really refers to anybody who uses braille. And the Braillists Foundation has a simple mission to spread braille and tactile literacy. And we do this through a range of online events. We have a beginner's course to introduce braille, some reading groups where you can practice braille skills. And then for more experienced braille readers, we have masterclasses that focus on perhaps a more technical subject or aspect of braille. So if you're interested in braille and braille advocacy, then do get involved with that community over at braillists.org. We have people join us from all over the world. We've got several thousand people on our mailing list. We regularly get a hundred people come to our online events, and we are also partnering with ICEVI WBU Braille Literacy Global Campaign, and we were proud to host the launch on World Braille Day, January the 4th.
OLEG:
Dave Williams, Manager of Customer Experience at Dot Incorporated, a staunch advocate of braille literacy. And I'd really like to see more people like that. Dave, thank you for doing the webinar and thank you for joining us on FSCast.
DAVE:
It's been a pleasure, Oleg. Thank you so much. If listeners would like to know more about Dot Pad and to use that with JAWS, you can visit Dot's websites, dotincorp.com. D-O-T-I-N-C-O-R-P.com.
OLEG:
So that was Dave Williams. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is our one and only Elizabeth Whitaker. Hello, Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH:
Hi, Oleg. How are you?
OLEG:
Doing very, very well. Let me ask you, what's the most fascinating braille related development for you over the last couple of years?
ELIZABETH:
I would say by all means, multi-line braille. It's just such a game changer. Having the ability to read multiple lines of braille, have it right there at your fingertips, just for so many uses, whether you're accessing tables and spreadsheets or just information. For me, for example, maybe if we're recording information, for recording a video and just having that video script right there where you don't have to continuously pan, and being able to read books without continuously having to pan and just having it there at your fingertips and all of those great features that come with it is just a game changer.
OLEG:
Do you use any of those multi-line braille displays on a regular basis yet?
ELIZABETH:
Well, I have the Dot Pad that is on loan to me for the webinar, so I have been using that for the last few months.
OLEG:
So you know exactly what you're talking about?
ELIZABETH:
Oh, yes.
OLEG:
Perfect. And now, you also know about our upcoming webinars for February. So what do we have?
ELIZABETH:
We actually have two webinars in February. So we are continuing our AI webinars into 2026. And on February 5th, that's Thursday at noon Eastern, we are going to talk about Claude. So we've been walking through all these different tools that are available. We want to introduce all of you to different ways to access AI. And Claude is another one of those tools. So we're going to be talking about how to access it. We're really going to be focusing on some tasks related to research and writing. How to get started with a project, how to gather all the information, how to finalize that project from start to finish.
OLEG:
And how about a software webinar?
ELIZABETH:
We are actually tackling something that we've gotten a lot of requests for. So back in 2025, we hosted a webinar on the OneDrive desktop app, and now we are going to talk about Microsoft OneDrive online with JAWS. That's going to take place on Thursday, February 19th at noon Eastern. For more information, visit FreedomScientific.com/training/freewebinars.
OLEG:
And for any training related emails, write to [email protected]. And for FSCast, write to [email protected].
Elizabeth, good luck to you and your team with all the upcoming webinars.
ELIZABETH:
Thank you, Oleg.
OLEG:
And from all of us here at Vispero, thanks for listening, and see you all in February. Bye.
ELIZABETH:
Bye.