Show notes
Hi and welcome to another Vision Australia vision store product highlight demo and in this demo you'll be hearing an interview that I did on my Vision australia radio talking tech podcast on July 16, 2024. We have an interview from Peter Cracknell manager of blindness products for Quantum all about the new Mountbatten braille tutor. If you'd like to find more about the Mount Batten braille tutor and also the other cool stuff that Quantum Technology actually sell their website is https://www.quantumrlv.com.au, and then as they say on with the show.Oh and by the way smile, Vision Australia also sells the Mount Batten Braille Tutor as wellHttps://shop.visionaustralia.orgThis Vision Australia Radio Talking Tech podcast is made possible by Vision Store. Remember, all Vision Stores are open to the general public. You don't need to be a Vision Australia client to visit. Pop in any time to browse and shop the latest in assistive technology and more. We turn to our guest now, Peter Cracknell, who is Manager of Blindness and Low Vision Technologies with Quantum Reading Learning Vision. Good to have you with us, Peter. Thank you, Stephen. Good morning. Over to you, David. Moving on to our main topic, Peter, and I've loved the Mountbatten itself since 1991, which I think when it first came out. What's the main new whiz-bang thing happening with the Mountbatten Tutor now? Well, the Mountbatten Tutor, which is manufactured by Harpo in Poland, we used to manufacture that in Rydonmead in Sydney for many, many years. After the LS version, Harpo made the whisper at the Mountbatten Whisperer and now this new model, the Mountbatten Tutor. The essential purpose is much the same as it's always been, which is really focused around early Braille learning, usually for children, but not always. And that purpose still remains. And in fact, all of the features and commands that people might have known previously for the other models also in the Mountbatten Tutor. I guess one of the things that the new model does do is tries to put those sorts of commands and settings into a menu system that's a bit more intuitive. You don't have to remember the commands. You can just go through a spoken menu system, which is just a conventional menu system to adjust margins and translation formats and so on. And that is also shown on a liquid crystal display actually on the body of the machine. So that's integrated into the Mountbatten Tutor and that means that a teacher aid or a parent, they can actually navigate that. It also has spoken output of course, and more intuitively, don't change the settings to Braille translation grade and that sort of thing. Whereas before they would have to remember a particular command, which they would input through the keyboard. The keyboard has been modified. So on the older models, they had various keys that perhaps not so recognizable on a conventional keyboard, whereas with the Mountbatten Tutor keyboard, it actually follows the pattern of a conventional keyboard with an escape key, a backspace key, an enter key, a space bar and so on. Plus, of course, the traditional what we call the Perkins keys for typing Braille. And that keyboard is also detachable from the body of the Mountbatten Tutor, which gives just a lot more options for different configurations where perhaps a child couldn't actually line up as they straight on. They might want to have the keyboard at a slight angle or perhaps it might be easier to operate if the child was in a wheelchair or something like that. So Peter, I've got a few quick questions, I guess. Number one is if you know how to use the earlier versions of the Mountbatten, which to me is electronic Brailler, which was actually very, very cool. I'm sure if you know that, then you know how to basically use the new Mountbatten Tutor. Yes David, that's absolutely right. If you ever operated a previous model, there'll be absolutely no difficulty operating this one. It could be that you ha

