Impact reporting
Bristol Braille regularly reports its impact to various partners. What follows is a truncated subset of reports for public consumption. If you would like to read earlier reports, more in depth ones on specific areas of impact, or reports not for public consumption, please get in contact with your request.
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of March, 2023
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2023-04-12
The Canute 360 project is making affordable digital Braille available to blind people all around the world. Its successor project, the Canute Console, has been rolled out in pilots and is already starting to have a positive impact on people’s career options. Its focus is on computer science and cyber security.
Our friends in the Braillists Foundation, whom we support, continue to improve the Braille skills of hundreds of blind people a month.
Key impacts
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The Canute Console pilots have given a number of people reason to buy the Console to further career goals within computer science and cyber security that they as blind people would otherwise be excluded from, including taking part in competitions and taking on ‘visual’ design work.
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By the end of March we estimate we have a user-base of around 200 blind Braille using people using Canute 360 regularly to advance their education and employment.
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Through our indirect sponsorship the Braillists Foundation has continued the self-taught Braille for Beginners course, which currently has over a hundred people signed up to it. Through our direct sponsorship the Braillists and BBT collaborated to run a series of computer science master classes, four in total, each lesson of which was delivered to between 40 to 60 people over the last quarter and was a great success.
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Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of June, 2023
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2023-07-14
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We have continued testing and field work of the Canute Console, including having it being used in situ in schools, offices and homes by both blind adults and children. We’ve tested it with a number of workflows, concentrating on hacking, application development and sysadmin. We have now secured the supply chain, production and orders to see it widely available and in the hands of customers.
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Through our indirect sponsorship the Braillists Foundation has continued the self-taught Braille for Beginners course and regular Masterclasses. The Braillists is currently reaching hundreds of people a month, a steady increase. BBT specifically sponsored the Computer Science masterclasses which continue to be downloaded and referenced.
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Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of December, 2023
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2023-10-17
Key developing impact
The first batch of Canute Consoles was supplied to our Early Bird customers who have started to apply it for their own professional and personal ends, including sysadmin, security and music technology. We believe this is the first multiline Braille computer science workstation which has been made available to blind people anywhere in the world, so we are very pleased to have crossed that barrier. We strongly believe that although we started small, with around 16 customers, this is a permanent change which will expand outwards exponentially as we and others push Braille in new directions.
Ongoing impacts
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By the end of September we estimate we continue to have a user-base of around 230 blind Braille using people using Canute 360 or Canute Console regularly to advance their education and employment.
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The Braillists community has exceeded 1,800 subscribers, of whom about half are assumed to be from the UK.
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of March, 2024
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2024-04-16
We have scheduled events to run from next quarter at our new permanent facility in Bristol. We look forward to updating you on that once the impact is felt.
Canute Consoles are being sent out to a wide range of users and we are supporting those people in pursuing the eclectic applications they are putting them to.
We continue to support our hundreds of existing Canute 360 customers get the most out of Braille, and support the Braillists Foundation as they improve the knowledge of hundreds of blind people each quarter.
Key developing impact
The key impact this quarter has been the remarkable range of firsts we have seen people using their Canute Consoles for. We have assisted people use their Console for generating music, programming, testing code security, mapping, the study of ancient languages and many other applications. In some cases these are world-firsts and we foresee this inspiring many more tactile readers to go into fields that they might have otherwise felt were closed to them.
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“I’m a senior software developer for a big UK defence company. What your doing is fantastic and has the possibilities to really change the way in which blind people can learn elements of computer science. When I was in Uni I found it tricky to understand many of the concepts around UML, a widely use graphical systems for describing the design of software […] I’d imagine though if I’d have been able to feel the diagrams in front of me when I was learning UML the concepts would have been much easier to grasp and something like the Canute Console could present UML in a way that would make sense to both blind and sighted students […] it could simplify the development of a Ui that looks good to the sighted by a blind developer.”
— A panellist from a BBT sponsored Braillists Foundation event.
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of June, 2024
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2024-07-11
Key developing impact
Further uses that our community have been putting the Canute Console to this quarter include mapping the constellations, creating explorable online worlds and learning to program in Python. All these are developed with and by blind people and result in new opportunities for blind people to study and develop careers in new areas by sharing their results.
Quotes and media
One of our users, a blind 17 year old student, demonstrating a videogame he developed on the Canute Console: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPc2d2hpmS0
“I’ve been working on adding multiline Braille support [to my videogame, Theoland] so that as well as connecting to phones and computers and single line Braille displays you can actually connect with multiline Braille displays … The Console is really useful if you want to view maps in real time.”
— Theo Holroyd, Canute Console user
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of September, 2024
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2024-10-10
Key developing impacts
This quarter we have developed procedures to allow blind people in the UK to receive Canute Consoles through Access to Work and Disable Student Allowance schemes, reducing the financial burthen on individuals.
We have developed the software of the Console to be more user friendly so as to include those with limited technical knowledge. In other words it is no longer a computer science tool exclusively and has been started to be rolled out to serve a wider set of uses.
Within that we have developed a series of libraries that allow blind people to program their own spacial applications with ease.
Quotes and media
The Canute Console being used as a tactile silent cinema, showing the film ‘Accidentally Preserved, Cheer Up’ from 1924. This is of especial interest for deafblind people who cannot hear audio description. This application will be tested in a live showing in the next quarter.
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of December, 2024
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2025-01-16
Key developing impacts
The last quarter we began an exciting project called the Tactile Commons, to create the software and hardware to represent in electronic tactile form the outputs of any public data protocol that requires spacial output. For example any table of data, any line graph, any vector diagram. We will use this project to promote blind peoples’ opportunities within academic and commercial projects.
In the last quarter also successfully completed brand new Canute 360s using the new in-house production methods. We had been unable to produce new Canutes for over a year, since our previous stock of older design components was exhausted. This development has enabled us to begin to reach and distribute to new customers again, meaning that our user base — and therefore the impact made by developments of our technology, which are released to all — is growing again.
In the last quarter we were also able to sponsor, and thus help to go ahead, the Braillists Foundation’s first in person conference, the World Braille Day 2025 Conference, celebrating 200 years of Braille. The event took place on the 4th of January.
Quotes and media
The results of the Braillists’ conference can be found below:
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of March, 2025
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2025-04-16
We have added many powerful new features to our customers’ machines, allowing them to access data in entirely new ways.
Key developing impacts
Primary impact: In the last quarter we completed the majority of an exciting project called the Tactile Commons. This resulted in giving our existing customers the means to automatically generate tactile graphs, tables, menus, grid maps and their on custom user application interfaces. These features work with standard data types and have begun to create exciting new possibilities for blind peoples’ opportunities within academia and commercial enterprises.
Also: We also concluded our move to in-house production of machines with a delayed but successful assembly of Canute Consoles built without externally made plastic components. We supported our existing customers and reached new areas industry and academia with feedback from our customers, including enabling the reading of PDF mathematical documents from the Open University, as an example.
Quotes and media
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Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of June, 2025
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2025-07-16
Key developing impacts
Primary impact: We have been working hard to make the machines more accessible to non-technical users and have implemented functional spreadsheet viewers, diagram generators, improved interaction with files and external media, added support for Arabic, and many small improvements to workflow. In particular this was demonstrated in concluding Phase 3 of our Canute FIRST LEGO League project. This demonstrated at the FLL UK and Irish finals, attended by thousands of people and watched by many more online, that blind children can compete in engineering challenges. For more information see the Institute of Engineers and Technologists coverage, starting at 5.52:23: https://www.youtube.com/live/2nVHRsFIgLs?feature=shared&t=21143
Also:
- We began our Accessible Transport project and began speaking with blind people about their experience of accessibility in UK public transport and their hopes for better tactile maps.
- Having concluded our move to in-house projection wherever sensible we began the cautious process of seeking partners to do external assembly.
- We have also continued to support our several hundred existing customers, not least by creating upgrades for their devices.
- Finally, since the start of the year we were working on a project to bring Braille captions to silent cinema, working with Polly Goodwin. In Q1 we tested this; first in a private screening in London, then in a silent film festival in Bo’ness. In Q2 we developed the concept based on this feedback and made plans to roll it out more widely.
Quotes and media
“This [The Canute Console used in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge] is a fantastic project […] because we can bring more young people into this experience and hopefully they can get really interested in coding, in technology, which means that we can create the new engineers of the future.”
— Katy Deacon BEng MEng CEng FIET, IET Trustee and Vice President, Visiting Professor in Inclusive Engineering at the Royal Academy of Engineering
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of September, 2025
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2025-10-13
We have completed and tested a project which has made public transport route maps far more accessible for tactile readers, including blind and deafblind people.
Key developing impacts
Bristol Braille worked with the National Centre for Accessible Transport to prototype a unique tactile Braille mapping system. We worked with Sight Loss councils, transport companies, blind individuals and talented developers to address the lack of spatial mapping for blind people.
As a result there is now a unique tactile mapping application for public transport routes worldwide, available on the Canute Console, a British made 360 cell Braille workstation. There is also the means for anyone, anywhere in the world, to be sent free or low-cost embossed paper maps generated by that application.
Quotes, images and videos
Below is an example of results from testing in the field:
“I am staying with Roger and Margaret Wilson-Hinds [for this field test], Roger is a trustee for Deaf-blind UK.
“Marg has been exploring the bus maps, and discovered a bus stop they didn’t know existed.
“So they can now take the bus to the Dog and Pheasant, which is especially useful, as there are no taxis on the island where they live.
“I find it satisfying being able to access so much data so easily. It makes exploring far more possible.
“The developers have gone to great lengths to enable us to choose from many options what stations and routes we would like to investigate. We love the interactive nature of being able to interrogate the data on the Canute Console.
“This kind of preparation makes for far safer and more extensive travel options.”
— Steph Sergeant
We have released a Youtube audio recording describing the project. The recording is 23’54” and includes sub-titles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyMrDcISekU
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of December, 2025
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2026-01-15
Key developing impacts
This past quarter production of Canutes has been steadied with a new production line, machines have been sent out to new customers, many of our existing customers have been actively supported or their machines upgraded with new capabilities.
However the biggest developing impact has been the software that is going into the Console and the as-yet unreleased Scientific, specifically new spreadsheet applications, graphing applications, chess, climate data and a general vast expansion of the scientific and technical usefulness of the Canute — and we believe Braille as a whole — to blind specialists working in academia or industry. This is illustrated below.
Quotes, images and videos
Below is an example of results from testing in the field:
“I am thoroughly enjoying my Canute Console so far. I have used it for many things including programming and delivering my classes. You would not believe how much easier it is to be able to read a whole slides-worth of information in one go. [My colleague] used the word “transformative”, and “makes your presentation go from absolute darkness to light. More than just day and night”. Graph theory on Monday…”
— Hollie Baker, Lecturer in Computer Science at Bath Spa University
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 31st of March, 2026
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2026-04-15
Key developing impacts
In the past quarter we have continued to support hundreds of Canute customers get more out of Braille and have released numerous new software packages, and updated existing ones, to target workflows important to our customers.
However the biggest news is the release of the Canute Scientific, right at the end of the quarter, which is still on-going, including all new improved hardware, especially in the more portable and robust chassis, and unified neatened up user experience for the aforementioned workflows, which, for the future, are being heavily targeted at STEM applications. These workflows support our ongoing and expanding vision of accessible hacker/maker spaces targeting sysadmin, cyber security and application development for blind people.
Quotes, images and videos
This quarter we would like to share developments in the form of a brochure and a video series.
Canute Scientific pre-launch brochure
Youtube: Canute Scientific Braille display
Quarterly Impact Report, up to the 30th of June, 2026
Ed Rogers, MD, Bristol Braille Technology CIC, 2026-07-17
Key developing impacts
In the past quarter we sold or had reserved the majority of our Canute Scientifics from the initial 1st Edition batch, with a strong focus on supporting technical subjects in higher education or employment.
Over the last quarter we have been demonstrating the Scientific to hundreds of people regionally, nationally and internationally. This has a wider social good, besides generating future orders: we are giving people the reassurance that they can take on certain technical subjects, tasks or roles that they may otherwise be told or assume would be inaccessible. We have had numerous people tell us what different the device will (if they go on to reserve units) or could make to their careers, including in network security, organisation management, mathematics and music.
We have also released software which go far beyond our customer base: Full page multiline Braille display support in the Orca screen-reader, include support for a variety of innovative new modes. This will be available for all current and future multiline Braille users of Orca around the world, which is almost every Braille using Linux user.
Quotes, images and videos
This quarter we would like to continue to share developments in the form of our evolving video series, which now includes many more videos of applications, especially focused on advanced mathematics.
Other links
Canute Scientific web brochure: https://canute-scientific.bristolbraille.org