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Canute Console Premium image
Football match displayed
Coding example
Close up of braille cells
Sighted and visually impaired people working together

Canute Console Premium from Bristol Braille Technology

£5,994.00 Inc. VAT £4,995.00 Excl. VAT

Product Description

Introducing the Canute Console Premium from Bristol Braille Technology, a revolutionary product that enables  Braillists to read a whole page at a time. With a high contrast 13″ monitor synced to a 360 cells Braille display users can easily collaborate with blind and sighted colleagues, explore maps, create diagrams, play classic video games, watch sports matches and many other specialist applications across nine lines of Braille!

The best way to read and edit documents in Braille

Download and edit documents, Braille files and tables from the web, company shared drives or USB stick and edit them on the Canute Console.

Type on a Qwerty keyboard which pulls out on a tray under the display and tucks away when you want to read without your wrists pressing keys. A luxurious 360 cells of Braille that maintains print white-space and centring and lets you read multiple columns of text or numbers. You can even edit two different documents at the same time, next to each other, on the same Braille display and still have 160 cells per document.

With the Canute Console as your workstation you can write better, review better, and you can collaborate better!

The Canute Console Premium comes with a Canute 360 Braille display which can be detached and used as a stand-alone ebook reader, an extended warranty, an aluminium flight case and a day’s custom development time from Bristol Braille.

Map, Watch, Play, Explore, Create, Program, then Publish!

The Canute Console possesses a distinctive capability to expand the possibilities of Braille and tactile graphics. By utilizing Braille characters as symbols, Bristol Braille have developed entire tactile environments and experiences that were once beyond the reach of touch.

Owners of the console can design their own applications without any prior knowledge by employing it’s  straightforward system of code snippets. However, this is not a necessity, as the console is equipped with various programs, including a top-down city explorer that produces 5-yard-per-cell scale maps of any city, a match replay feature for broadcast football games that provides a detailed account of the ball’s movement across the pitch, the classic arcade game Snake, and tools for free-hand tactile image and ASCII art drawing.

The development team is continually working on additional features. With the Canute Console Premium, users receive development assistance from Bristol Braille to help create their own applications or to prototype one for sharing with others. To date, these collaborations have encompassed graphing, mapping constellations, drawing early Germanic runes, MIDI programming, flow diagrams, original video games, and various computer science projects.

The Console combines the capabilities of the Linux terminal, the BRLTTY screen reader, and the non-profit mission of Bristol Braille, aligning with the aspirations of touch readers to forge a new future for Braille and tactile graphics.

The Canute Console Premium comes with a Canute 360 Braille display which can be detached and used as a stand-alone ebook reader, an extended warranty, an aluminium flight case and a day’s custom development time from Bristol Braille.

 

 

Canute Console specifications

  • Two part hardware: THe Braille display docks into the workstation, but can also be detatched and used on its own as a stand-alone ebook reader.
  • Canute 360 Braille display with 360 cells over nine lines, 40 cells per line
  • Desktop workstation (not battery operated): 15″ x 8″ x 2″, 8lb.
  • 13″ high contrast monitor
  • Stereo speakers
  • Runs on Raspian (Debian based), including the BRLTTY screen reader and many custom tools developed by BBT to create and visualise data
  • Raspberry Pi 400 computer, features a quad-core 1.5GHz 64-bit ARM7 processor, 4GB of RAM, WiFi and Bluetooth networking, as well as a 40-pin GPIO header and 3x USB-A ports
  • Slide-out keyboard
  • Custom manufactured case
  • Ergonomically designed for Braille readers

 Design decisions behind the Canute Console

The Canute Console’s Braille display can be switched between Literary Braille for a familiar environment and Computer Braille, for letter for letter identical layout in Braille as a sighted person will see on the monitor. Thus the Console can be used by Braille readers to develop spacial — even graphical — applications for sighted audiences.

The Canute Console runs from the command line of an operating system called Raspbian, based on Debian Linux. Why Linux? The Canute Console can be switched to Console Mode to operate from the Linux command line, a powerful and universal working environment brilliantly suited to Braille. The Console can be used to log into and control servers or desktop computer running Linux, Windows, MacOS or embedded IoT devices. It can be used for cross developing apps for any operating system. SSH into your home Windows PC in refreshable Braille! Don’t know what SSH means but curious to find out? Try the Braillists Foundation’s Masterclasses on Linux.

The Canute Console integrates a Raspberry Pi 400 computer. Why Raspberry Pi? The Pi has fast become the world’s most commonly used and supported computer for educational, embedded and IoT development. Its a great choice for students and developers and — as the Console is also designed to be used as a terminal for controlling remote servers — the user is not restricted to ARM7 for more intensive applications.

Applications for the Canute Console

Here are a number of applications we at BBT, with our community, have either tested, modified or developed to use on the Canute Console.

Some of these are ready and come with the Canute Console on purchase, some are experimental and we can load them onto a customers machine on request.

All of these make maximum use of all 360 cells; ever cell of each 40 character line as been eked out to create new and exciting applications in Braille. Fundamentally though, the Console is about using nine-line refreshable Braille to crack open the world of spacial app development to blind people. The following are some example applications.

  • Micro, text editor for programming and word processing. Also available, all the usual Linux text editors, vi, nano, emacs.
  • Cities Through Braille, top down city exploration map game, where the player can explore real cities by down loading their data off the internet.
  • Association Football, where you choose from any country or club league or cup game of (soccer) football and watch it replay across a tactile football pitch in real time, with highlights, rewind, fast forward, and Braille commentary for every single play. Feel every movement of the ball, every yard moved, every shot blocked.
  • Snake. That’s right, the old Nokia game, re-imagined as a tactile experience, including a pre- and early-Braille learning levels system.
  • Dynamic Braille Sheets, taking spreadsheets (Excel compatible) and rendering them to the Braille display, including multiple columns and rows, zooming in and out.
  • Flow, a visualiser for creating and presenting flow diagrams. It works just as well for the Braille user creating them as for their sighted colleagues being shown the graphical version (with exactly the same layout, of course!)
  • Dungeon Explorer, very much does what it says on the tin. Not only have we built our own, but you, the user, can modify almost any ascii-based rogue-like, or indeed any other ascii-based game, to run on their Console.
  • Maths Pretty Print, for viewing LaTex maths equations as spacial multiline formula, as they were meant to be seen.
  • SVG out, a simple test showing how easy it is to use the Console to turn supposedly visual media, such as Scalable Vector Graphics, into a tactile version of the same.
  • Free Draw, for drawing diagrams free-hand in Braille ascii. We use it for drawing floor plans, which can be done in a couple of minutes.
  • Present, a demonstration of how easy it is with a multiline display to present the same spacial info to both a blind and sighted audience on the Console using just common Linux tools. In this case, Pandoc and LibreOffice to make presentations that show the same data and layout on a Powerpoint compatible slide show as on the Braille display.
  • All those command line applications that rely on more than one line to really make sense, or output logs over more than one line? Yes, they work much, much better when you can see them over a live, updating Braille page, trust us!

Whatever we do we make the sources viewable to the Console user (in refreshable Braille, of course), to help people learn from them, or adjust them to hack them for their own purposes.

Endless Collaboration Opportunities

Would your organization gain from blind individuals confidently understanding the visual aspects of objects?

Or from sighted individuals being able to create documents in Braille or tactile graphics without prior knowledge of Braille?

The Canute Console represents a groundbreaking advancement as the first computer to provide equal display capabilities for both touch and visual readers. The visual monitor and Braille display synchronize to present identical information in the same format. This allows a blind user to effectively review the work of their sighted colleagues, enables a sighted individual to produce tactile documents for their blind peers, and permits two blind students to collaboratively develop a spatial, visual application without the need for sighted assistance. By offering a Braille display that reflects visual content and visuals that correspond to Braille, it fosters innovative possibilities in the realm of tactile applications.

The Canute Console Premium comes with a Canute 360 Braille display which can be detached and used as a stand-alone ebook reader, an extended warranty, an aluminium flight case and a day’s custom development time from Bristol Braille.

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