The 40th Assistive Technology Conference from the Centre on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge took place in Anaheim, California from Monday 10 to Friday 14 March 2025, bringing together manufacturers, distributors, educators, researchers and users from all over the world. As ever, a wide variety of braille products was on show at the exhibit hall, and the conference programme featured several braille-related presentations including research on how the length of a braille display affects reading speed, reflections on 200 years of tactile literacy, and the candidate release of the new EBraille specification from the DAISY Consortium and the American Printing House for the Blind (APH).
In this session, recorded on Tuesday 18 March, we were excited to be joined by the team from Double Tap, the popular technology show from Accessible Media Inc. (AMI). Steven Scott and Shaun Preece both attended CSUN for the first time this year. They told us about the braille products they saw and shared their perspectives on how CSUN compares with exhibitions like Sight Village in the UK, Sight City in Germany, and more mainstream events such as the Zero Project Conference and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
We were also joined by Australian assistive technology expert and braille enthusiast Scott Erichsen. Scott has been at the forefront of the development of braille technology for over twenty years as a user, a private beta tester and a distributor, and told us about the new and improved products in the exhibit hall. He also shared his insights into how the braille technology industry is evolving and the part that CSUN plays in driving innovation forwards.
Links
- Procter & Gamble
- Duxbury
- Treasure Ireland in EBraille Format
- Tactile Graphics Image Library (TGIL)
- Monarch, Mantis Q40 and TactileView from HumanWare
- Braille Doodle from the Touch Pad Pro Foundation, sold in the UK by Sight and Sound Technology
- Braille Pen 24 from Harpo
- Dot Pad and Dot Cell from Dot Inc.
- Play with Braille from Lego
- BrailleSense 6, BrailleSense 6 Mini and Braille eMotion from Selvas BLV (formerly Hims)
- Activator and Activator Pro from Help Tech, sold in the US by Dream Vision Group and in the UK by VisionAid Technologies
- JAWS from Vispero
- Optima from Access Mind
- Braille cells from KGS
- insideONE+ and insideSUPRA from insidevision
- b.book and b.note from Eurobraille, sold in the UK by Professional Vision Services
- BT Speak and BT Braille from Blazie Technologies
- Orbit Reader Q20, Orbit Reader Q40, Graphiti and Graphiti Plus from Orbit Research, sold in the UK by Aspire Consultancy
- Codex from New Haptics
- Blind Level Tech podcast from Aftersight
- Main Menu from ACB Media (American Council of the Blind)
- Tech Talk from RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People)
