How very interesting. I am going to keep this.
I just was rather dense and simply did not get the point of what the machine
was supposed to do.
Mary Ellen Earls
Remember! Today is the Tomorrow you thought about yesterday.
----- Original Message -----
From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Contribute Braillenote" <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 27, 2004 12:37 PM
Subject: [Braillenote] the mountbatten brailler
Hello Listers,
I have been intrigued by much of the ill-informed comments concerning the
Mountbatten Brailler which have recently been offered in the list.
Firstly, with regard to its appearance, beautiful or otherwise,. Surely,
beauty is in the eye, or hand, of the beholder. Its design is a very
practical one. For example, the handle, placed as it is on the front,
makes it very much easier to carry than many Braillers. As for being
designed principally for young children; I've seldom heard a more
incorrect statement. I worked for many years in an advanced college for
the blind into which the Mountbatten was introduced as their main
Brailler. The students had been, for the most part, brought up using the
mechanical perkins Brailler, and were therefore used to keyboard
manipulation. No student was able to over-run the mountbatten. At last
we had a machine which was fast and did not rely for good Braille on how
hard you could thump it, and would accept paper ranging in size from
postcards to the largest available. So far as I can ascertain, it is
still the only truly portable electronic Brailler being produced in the
world; though it was originally launched in about 1990. Since then it has
been considerably developed until today it even has speech assistance and
is quieter than formerly. I have found my machine, old though it now is,
highly versatile. I have been able to carry out successful embossing from
the Eureka, the Aria, the Braille-n-speak and the Braillenote. it even
has its own translation program which means you can set it up to take text
direct from a computer and produce formatted Braille text. The production
of copies of documents is facilitated by its memory. I am not trying to
sell Mountbatten Braillers, but let's be fair in our criticism. It is not
the quietest of embossers, but neither is it the noisiest. It is handy
especially for short documents, which are often wasteful of paper if
produced by larger specialist embossers. to sum up: a very handy domestic
embosser and Brailler. Incidenta
lly, it was not named after Prince Philip, but his uncle, Lord Louis
Mountbatten, who was murdered by terrorists in Ireland. After his death a
trust was set-up in his memory. It was money from this trust which
developed this machine in which Prince Charles took a personal interest
and insisted on having it shown to him by students from the college before
it was launched. This I know to be true, I was there. The machine is now
produced in Australia.
Don Cooper.
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