What’s Out There: Notetakers
Notetakers, or PDAs for the Blind, are quite an investment. HOwever, they do have several advatages over a laptop. Namely, because they use proprietary environments, they are virus free & accessibility issues are a non-issue. I made a few slipups while speaking in the video. Regarding the hard drive on the Braille Plus, I mentioned something called the “Icon.” The Icon is a notetaker manufactured by LevelStar, which is a sibling product to the Braille Plus. I didn’t have it in this comparison, since they’re the same thing. Regarding the connectivity options, the very last item on the right with the $5,995 price tag was the Braille Sense, not the Braille Plus. This should ease anyone’s confused mind. Questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments.
Duration : 0:0:58
This, IMHO, is probably the biggest thing since sliced bread for the blindness PDA industry. Most of our PDAs have rather mediocre storage, by today’s standards, and for that storage & custom user interface that makes the device friendly for people who are blind, you pay about as much as you would for a good gaming PC (approximately $1,000-$2,000). This is the first possibility for a notetaking solution that I’ve seen, talking out of the box, for under $1,000. What do you get for that approximately $900? 64GB of flash storage, WiFi 802.11n (most notetakers are stuck at B or G), it talks out of the box (same setup procedure as the iPhone in iTunes), full sized keyboard on the dock, and the iWork suite ($30 for a full suite that is near-desktop experience; $10 each for individual apps). I love this. Braille may be coming for this. The feature in the iPhone that allows you to keep VoiceOver on with speech off makes me wonder. We’ll see when it comes out in late March.