Introduction
If you recall on the previous review, we discussed the Chameleon 20, and the third review for the Screenless Allies site was over it’s big brother, the Mantis Q40. On the Chameleon 20 review, we mentioned two other devices, the Brailliant models. On this review, we will go into more detail over these devices, the Brailliant BI 20, and 40X braille displays from HumanWare. These displays are the “blueprint” of where the designs of the Chameleon and Mantis came from, and we will discuss the differences between these 4 models.
Pricing
The cost for the Brailliant BI 40X is $3695, while the BI 20X is $2199. You cannot buy these using the “Quota Funds” that was mentioned in the previous reviews of these other braille displays. However, if you use PayPal, there is an option for you to pay in monthly installments. This also depends on if you have PayPal credit, and if said credit is good.
A Bit Of History
Before we go into the description of these devices, let’s enlighten you, the reader, with some history. In 2004, the first Brailliant braille display came out. At the time, the only way you could connect was using a serial port to the computer. You had VERY limited functionality in regards to what you could doo with its keyboard. Fast forward to 2010, the Brailliant BI series was launched. During that time, there were two models, which were the Brailliant BI 40, and 80. The number at the end of the name determined how many braille cels it had. These braille displays offered bluetooth and USB connectivity to computers and smartphones. During that time, you could only connect to one device at a time. The USB connection was Micro, and as some might remember, those cables were quite easily breakable. Fast forward to 2021, and HumanWare decided to make a new generation of this display, now offering notetaking features, plus USB C, which is the new standard. The previous models were discontinued by them, and now, these models remain. We will now discuss how these new ones work below. Note that from here forward, we will refer to these units as “Brailliant,” for simplicity. However, if something is found on only one model, we will note it accordingly.
In the Box
After you unpack the box, you will find the following items in it:
- Brailliant unit, depending which model you purchased.
- Carrying Case, which is NOT made of hard shell material. It is made of a strong leather. We still do not recommend dropping the unit.
- USB C Charging cable and block
- Charging heads for the wall outlet, especially if you are in another country. Most countries have different wall outlets.
- getting started guides in both braille and print.
Orientation
The Brailliant BI 20X is about the size of an iPhone 14 pro device. If you combine two of those models, you will get the Brailliant 40. Both models weigh about half a pound when holding them in your hands. The Brailliant models have the same layout, except for some differences on the 40. We will outline those as they come up. We will start at the sides, and end up at the top of the device.
Front Pannel
On the front, you will find the HumanWare “Signature Thumb keys.” All braille devices that they have developed over the years have had these buttons, and they even perform the same functions. Starting from left to right, the layout is as follows:
“Previous, Up, Down, and Next.”
The thumb keys can be configured to your liking from the options menu of these devices. In the middle of the front pannel, in between “Up and Down,” you will find a circular button. This is the “Home” button that takes you to the main menu from anywhere.
Left side
On the left side of the device, you will find a standard USB port, the “Power” button, a LED light indicator, and the USB C port to charge and connect the unit to a computer. The Brailliant supports a thumb drive for storage, or, if you want a simulation to what a Mantis would be like, you can connect a QWERTY keyboard to it, and type into the device using a keyboard.
Right Side
Since the back of the unit has nothing, we’ll now move to the right side. Starting from the bottom, you will find a headphone jack. Above that, are two rectangular buttons. These are the volume buttons. Like the Chameleon, the Brailliant has Text-To-Speech capabilities, which can be useful in some situations.
Top Face
On the top face of the unit, from front to back, you will find two space bars, the braille display, followed by the cursor router buttons, which are the springy looking buttons. Above that, you will find the braille keyboard, which has the standard orientation as a Perkins braille writer. The keys do NOT go all the way into their enclosures when you press them like your ordinary keyboard keys, which is nice. This could save said keyboard from sticking and can save money on repairs. Above the keyboard, on the left and right sides, are some speakers, that will allow the unit to speak. If you are using a 20 cell, the speaker is in the middle.
Brailliant 40 Control Keys
On the left and right sides of the braille display part of the 40 cell model of the Brailliant, you will find six round buttons, three on each side. These are known as “control keys,” and can be used in different ways in “Terminal Mode.” These functions depend on your screen reader you are using. Starting from the bottom, and heading towards the top, the keys are “C1, C2, and C3” on the left, and “C4, C5, and C6” on the right. “C2 and C5” can be used to also scroll on your Braille display when reading. “C5” moves forward, and “C2” moves back. Some screen readers could tell you to do a braille letter combination on these keys to perform certain functions. For instance, in NVDA, to open the NVDA menu, you would press the “Letter N,” on these keys. So in this case, You would press “C1, C3, C4, and C5” all at the same time. Remember, though, that the keys in question are not going horrizontally like a standard keyboard. These keys go vertically, similarly to if you were doing screen away mode on your phone’s Braille Screen Input feature.
Brailliant Features
The Brailliant has a suite of simple, but useful apps that can help the user with simple tasks. It also has a couple of more items, compared to the Chameleon and Mantis models that were given to the American Printing House for the Blind to distribute. These apps are as follows:
- Editor (KeyPad): Used for basic word processing. The Brailliant has 16 gigabytes of storage built into the unit. It can open TXT, Word, PDF, and other mainstream document formats for reading.
- Braille editor: (KeyBRF): used to create braille files. Think of this app as a virtual Perkins braille writer, where whatever is written, only you can understand. If the voice is enabled, it turns off when using this app.
- Victor Reader: named after HumanWare’s successful line of digital book readers, this app allows you to read books and download them onto your device.
- Terminal: the main purpose of this device, where you connect to a computer or smartphone. Whatever the screen reader speaks, can be displayed in braille in this mode. You can have up to five bluetooth, and one USB device connected at once when using this app.
- Calculator (KeyCalc) a basic calculator to perform your essential math operations.
- File Manager (KeyFiles): an app to manipulate files and folders on the device.
So Many Keys
Here’s a bit more history that ties into the Brailliant’s structure. The “Key” prefix before the applications originates from the old notetakers that HumanWare used to develop. Essentially, this device was a special made portable computer with an operating system, and installed on said operating system, was an overlay of sorts. This overlay was called, “KeySoft.” KeySoft continues to be present on HumanWare notetakers, and has changed a LOT throughout the years, bringing new innovative features to the BrailleNote line of products. The last major change was when the BrailleNote Touch was released in 2016, and it had to be re-written to support the Android based notetaker. We will do a review of this notetaker in the very near future. In 2022, KeySoft was brought over to the Brailliant, but this edition is called, “KeySoft Lite.” This provides a basic experience of what a modern day BrailleNote is like, removing most of its advanced features and keeping the current feature set.
Options Menu
This menu is where your settings can be found such as for changing your language, your braille codes, and much more. There’s an option in the main menu labeled, “Options,” or from anywhere, press an “O Chord.” That is, the braille letter “O,” and the “Space Bar” at the same time. On the Mantis and Chameleon, this would be the “Settings” app.
Managing Menus
If your main menu is cluttered, you can remove some items from it. This does NOT uninstall apps, but you can move them off your main menu to save space and only keep the essentials. For instance, on my unit, the only apps I have enabled are the calculator, and terminal apps. This can be useful if you have a student that likes to explore, but you need to lock them in if they’re first time learners.
Shortcut Keys
One innovative thing about the KeySoft overlay on the HumanWare notetakers was the ability to switch from application to application quickly. Yes, you could prress the first letter of the menu option you wanted, and you still can do this on Brailliant, but there was a more convenient way to switch apps within other ones. For instance, if I wanted to go to the ‘Word Processor” from anywhere on the unit, whether it was from reading a book, or checking my calendar, I could press, “Backspace+Enter+W,” and it would take me there. The Brailliant has the EXACT same strategy to move through apps. For instance, you can press “Backspace+Enter+T” to go to “Terminal” mode. “Backspace+Enter+V,” takes you to the “Victor Reader” application.
Talk To Me
Like the Chameleon, the Brailliant has a built-in voice you can use to edit documents and read books. You can only have two voices at a time on the unit when using this mode.
Voice commands
To turn the voice on or off, press “Space+Previous Thumb-key.” This is a toggle, so when you turn it off, you will only see, “Speech: off” on the braille display. However, when you turn the voice back on, you will hear, “Speech: on.”
Rate
To increase or decrease the speed of the voice on the Brailliant, press “Enter+dot 5” to increase the speed, or “Enter+dot 2” to slow it down. On the previous review, we discussed a lagging issue with these voices while using the Chameleon braille display. Basically, when reading or typing and you have the speaking of letters enabled, it has trouble keeping up. Sadly, this has NOT been fixed on the Brailliant models. When speeding up the voice, it “eats” the beginning of what the device says after interacting with it. This only happens when the voice is sped up though. When slowing it down, there is an issue where the voice sounds choppy. We hope that in a future release this can get fixed.
Some Differences To Note
Since we have technically reviewed ALL of HumanWare’s new braille displays, it is time for us to break down the differences between these devices. There aren’t MAJOR differences in regards to apps, but there are minor ones to keep in mind. We will first go over the differences between both Brailliant 20, and Brailliant 40 models.
Differences in Brailliants
Let us take a look at the differences between the 20, and 40 cell model of this braille display.
Connections
Brailliant 40 has Bluetooth 5, while Brailliant 20 has Bluetooth 4.2 technology. This makes the Brailliant 40 be more reliable with connections, and be able to control devices at longer distances. While the Brailliant 20 has a great connection to all devices, the 40 has a more stable connection. For instance, you can control an iPhone from downstairs, while your phone is charging upstairs with a Brailliant 40, with no problem. The 20 needs to be closer in order for this to work.
Speakers
The Brailliants both have speakers for voice output. However, the Brailliant 20 only has one speaker, which is located in the middle of the device, on the top face. The Brailliant 40 has a pair of stereo speakers on each side of the unit, which brings slightly better sound quality.
Control Keys
The Brailliant 40 is the ONLY model that has the two sets of three control keys on each side of the display. The advantage is, most screen readers take advantage of this fact, and you can easily have a new set of commands exclusively for the 40’s control keys.
Differences in Brailliants, and Mantis and Chameleon.
Now that we covered the difference in the 20 and 40 models, let’s look at difference between these, and the Chameleon and Mantis display.
- Chameleon and Mantis have SD card slots, while Brailliant does not have one.
- “Library” on Chameleon and Mantis is called “Victor Reader” on Brailliant.
- The “Settings” app is “Options” on Brailliants.
- There is NO shortcut to activate this menu from anywhere on Brailliant and Mantis.
- There is no main menu manager on Mantis and Chameleon.
- There are NO intuitive shortcuts to switch from app to app on Mantis and Chameleon.
Pro’s and Cons
Now that we tackled the differences, let’s look at the good and the bad about these Brailliant displays.
Pro’s
- Easy to use interface
- basic applications to do simple tasks
- 12 hour battery life
Cons
The big con at the moment is speech. The lag is for sure an issue if you are either a student, or if you rely on speech when typing or proofreading documents. We hope this gets fixed soon, because there are people, like myself, that would love to have higher speeds when reading and writing if using a voice. If it does not keep up with our typing, then this could be a big issue for those that rely on this voice feature.
What’s the Future
Since we know that the Brailliants have speakers, it would be nice to be able to pair our phone to it and use these as bluetooth speakers. Of course, the speakers are NOT high quality, but it would be nice to be able to have a good way to make hands free phone calls, or listening to music while performing other tasks at the computer. If you are able to lock/unlock a phone, especially with a Brailliant 40, we believe this could be a useful feature to have, a controller/speaker for music from downstairs instead of having to grab your phone from other places.
Rating and Final Thoughts
Overall, I’m giving this line of braille displays a 4 out of 5. Again, if the speech issue could be resolved quickly, then HumanWare would have a solid braille display here, based on the features I mentioned above. I commend HumanWare for making a new, more modern hybrid braille device. We hope you have enjoyed reading this review on another braille display line. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.] Happy reading/writing!