BrailleBlaster 2024 Anticipating Exciting Updates

you are hello everyone and Welcome to our partner showcase Braille Blaster 2024 anticipating exciting updates as you're making your way into our webinar today you will see a poll question pop up we're we're wondering where who you are where you're from and um a little bit about what experience you have with BR Blaster so just take a couple of minutes to answer our poll and it should pop up right now I'm your host today Amanda Dennis and with us we have willow Freeman we have a couple of ground r

ules while you're making your way in the first is to please type your questions in the chat there will be no acvrep credits for this partner showcase and close captioning will also be available okay so the first question that we have for today in our last poll is how long have you used Braille Blaster never less than a year one to three years four to six years or more than six years it's amazing to think that it's been available for more than six years I know isn't it it is a trumpet Blast for B

raille that was the old slogan was it though what's the new slogan um I you know we're workshopping it okay I don't want to tie us to anything you know you could give people a little bit of a preview to what that might look like though you don't want to give a little sneak peek there Willow uh Braille Blaster blasting down barriers to Braille nice amazing we have about 85% of the people that have responded so how about if I end the poll and I share the results Amanda do you have those to share w

ith everybody or would you like I do all right so it looks like about 20% of you are joining us from the Northeast 34 from the southeast 11% from the Northwest 9% from the southwest uh and then we have a 23% representation from the Midwest 2% from a US Territory and 2% internationally as well so welcome everybody we're thrilled that you're joining with us today um it looks like a lot of you guys heard about this webinar either through our email chain or through the AP website and that a majority

of you guys are teachers of the visually impaired and about 2% are onm instructors we have assisted technology Specialists and Braille transcribers with us as long as as well as Rehabilitation professionals and a couple of people who do something else um as far as the Braille Blaster and people experience with using it 32% said that they've never used it 20% said that they have for less than a year uh about 32% for 1 to three years and four to six years for 12% of our audience and we have about

5% for more than six years all righty so we're going to start off our webinar today as I said earlier uh I'm your host Amanda Dennis and we are joined today by Willow Freeman who is the Braille technology product manager from AP so Willow take it away yes thank you thanks and welcome everyone so glad to have you all here um want to start off by just making sure everybody knows how to get BR Blaster um how to check it out so the first thing is you can go to brail blaster. org so just brail blast

er. org you don't even have to bother doing the www. bra Blaster .org that's how much we care about efficiency we took that right out of the URL so bra blaster. org if you type in brail Blaster into your favorite search engine uh it'll be the top result we are the we are Braille Blaster we are the only Braille Blaster uh I'm glad we got dibs on that name uh and so that gets you to the website and then from there uh is the download button you'll want to activate the download button and then that

will show you uh Barrel Blaster and there's a stable Channel and a beta Channel and it's just this radio button at the top so you can select stable or beta the betas get updated a lot more frequently so we actually will Elevate something to a beta and not necessarily move it to stable so we like to we like to make sure we get new features out there so they can be tested but unless there's like enough improvements and we're sure about the stability we will not push it to stable um but so you'll p

robably want to stay on the stable branch and there's a version for Windows Mac Linux and a universal version so if you're on Windows Windows is definitely the best version it has the most compatibility uh and then there is a Mac version and a Linux version and then this Universal version part of the idea behind here is notice so Windows Mac and Linux those are all installers so it needs to install on your computer and installing on your computer means admin rights not everybody has admin rights

on their computer and we update we update fairly frequently and it can be a pain to have to go ask your it person to approve a new install so the whole idea behind this Universal version is you can download this and it's just a zipped folder so you download this zipped folder you extract it and then it has all the versions in it and you just run the one that's relevant for your operating system we had the question come through the chat is Braille Blaster free yes Braille Blaster is free so it i

s a free Braille transcription program from AP and we'll get into more about it as we proceed um and if you have any questions uh for the chat you know please drop them in I love getting a chance to answer ad uh questions as they come in the chat because I don't want folks to be confused and if you have a question there's a decent chance that other folks have that question um but want to make sure I get to those another question came through the chat so you can you can send it to us only so host

s and panelists or you can send it to everyone it's probably better to send your question to everyone and then that way folks can see what questions are being asked but the question was asked admin rights are needed because BB is is open source correct uh bra Blaster is not open source so at the moment it's closed we may one day make it open source but for now it is it is closed but that's not why you need admin rights uh most things you install will require uh ad admin rights um it departments

are very strict and we are recording this and we'll make it available later all right so the prerequisite skills for use of brail Blaster are you do need to be familiar with Braille um it's very easy to use we're going to get into how you use it but it's not a license for people that don't know Braille to start making Braille you know we want to democratize braille as much as possible we want to make it as easy as possible for people to make Braille but you need to at least have some familiarity

with Braille in order to use braille Blaster um if you're going to be giving it to a student now if you want to use braille Blaster as a tool to learn Braille for yourself have at it you don't need to know Braille to do that but if you're going to be giving it to a kid you owe it to that that student to know Braille yourself so that you know they're getting quality materials um it's really important that you you do that and there is no opening code because we're not doing um continuing educatio

n credits for this webinar all right so we're getting a ton of questions in the chat and I I did this to myself but these are relevant questions and it's good to address them so uh Cindy asked that sometimes she notices that brail Blaster closes or freezes while working and wants to know why um so the big thing is if you have not updated Braille blaster in a long time um we are constantly addressing the stability and trying to address issues so we've just put out our first update to the stable b

ranch in a long time and that's the whole reason we're doing this webinar is we want to make sure folks get this latest version get this version 2.1.3 uh that is available right now basically we had bar Blaster 1.0 then we had 2.0 now we're at 2.1 and the whole idea of 2.1 is to combine the kind of the best features from uh one 1.0 and 2.0 uh and the stability is better than it's ever been we're still doing some cleanup from this massive overhaul uh but we're in a really good place where it's ea

sier than ever for us to apply these updates all right so that's how you get Braille Blaster go ahead and download it we also have a list of frequently asked questions uh and these are still relevant and we have uh documentation uh for using Braille Blaster you know one big key about using bra Blaster is and this is something we can't really do much about like we try to address it as much as we can but you know Braille translation is it's complicated but it's fairly straightforward too you know

the computer can basically handle it there's some things that come up here and there that you need to be aware of um but it's not that complicated from the user perspective of rail blaster ever formatting is complicated so Braille formatting is very complicated and Braille Blaster attempts to handle as much of that um as much of that as it can but there's definitely a learning curve to using all the styles that are available in Braille Blaster so we'll get into that a little bit today but the bi

g thing you'll want to be aware of is formats 2016 which is the you know available at Braille authority.org I've got it here on the screen and I'll put it in the chat but this is the rules for Braille formatting available from the Braille authority of North America if you're not familiar with these rules and you're making Braille you probably want to familiarize yourself with these rules brail Blaster does everything it can to handle these things for you uh as much as it can but you you want to

be able uh you want to be able to address them yourself we're getting a ton of questions in the chat um so students do students need to be fluent in Braille before using Braille Blaser uh no so the first thing I'll say there is Braille Blaster is not really designed for students not not younger students so if you have a student that's on the younger end they probably aren't the Right audience for Braille Blaster uh um if it's an older student and you're teaching them to be independent and to mak

e their own Braille uh that's a think a great thing to do but they probably need some fluency in Braille uh before you start doing that um and Braille Blaster is accessible uh so they should be able to use it if you're noticing issues with embossing thank you for letting us know we will review that we test embossing with every update and haven't noticed issues on our end uh but we will check it out and I'll also show how you can uh I'm also G to uh show you how you can uh report issues with brai

l Blaster all right so bra blaster. org is how you get the program and then the other thing you can do is you can can go to ap.org and we actually have a braille Blaster page on Braille blaster or on ap.org and from there you can get back to the main page now I noticed some folks typing in with like very specific issues to their experience using Braille Blaster we're not going to be able to get to all of those today um and so the big thing I would ask folks to do not everybody does this and we r

eally really appreciate it when folks do take advantage of this is we have a feedback form so it's on baster. org under feedback so you put in your name you put in your email here's a look at all of my emails let's give my personal email out to everyone um so there's a list of all the emails and then you can put bug or feature request and so once you select bug or feature request then you can put the subject and then you can describe the issue that you are having um and so just give us as much i

nformation as you can like so the person who wrote in that they were having issues with embossing uh it would be really helpful to just say like hey I updated to this version and I'm trying to use my page Blaster and it's not working and I'm getting some poor embossing and here's what's happening when I try to emboss and then we can take that feedback and and then incorporate that in a future version um the last thing on feedback form is it says what is 1+ 8 uh in my case so those numbers are ra

ndomly generated um it'll be basically any number between I think one and nine but the idea here is it's in place of a capcha if you're familiar with captas they're a way to stop uh basically robots from being able to fill out your form and spam you with all kinds of messages so instead of having a capcha which are really often inaccessible and kind of a pain to use we just have this very simple math problem and the robots can technically get around it but most of them don't bother so the whole

idea is just being slightly inconvenient so that the the robots don't try to don't try to spam us with messages uh and if you have any issues with it you can also email csa.org um customer service can help with Braille Blaster um the amount of help that we can give is limited uh the main thing we like to do is like just take down the feedback and then share that back with the development team and the whole reason like we can't help a ton with Braille Blaster through customer service is we're alr

eady investing a lot of money into Braille Blaster and it's expensive um and it's free so it's this free program and we can't we can't pour a lot of additional resources into it uh by offering extensive customer service on a free product um we you know we have a great customer service team and they love to help folks um but there is a limit to how much guidance they can give a person uh who's using BR Blaster so the feedback forms your best way to let us know about an issue and then once you fil

l it out you can click submit before we move on I also want to make sure folks are aware of Braille zhr so it's also available through Braille blaster. org and bra Zephyr is a bra a brf editor so it basically mimics like a Perkins braer but digital uh it's similar to perky duck which a lot of you are probably familiar with um it has a great Bell warning which we advertised three times uh on the uh list of features and that was a much requested feature when it first came out there were very passi

onate users that insisted we should have a bell warning uh and that's also available for windows and Linux though one thing I want to point out is Braille Blaster is a Java program and so it requires Java in order to work uh if you install Braille Blaster it will automatically install Java so we install the version of java that we want to make sure you have and that gives you the ability to run the the program Braille Zer does not do that so Braille Zer just installs itself if you've already ins

talled Braille Blaster you should be fine because Braille Blaster will have installed Java you'll be set you'll have everything you need and then when you install and run bra ZR it should just use that same version of java and everything else uh should work and finally we have a contact us page uh you can join our mailing list so you can hear about the latest announcements and then it directs you to some other things and also gives our customer service information and lastly is the Donate page s

o because it is free uh we do appreciate uh folks if you use bra Blaster a lot uh donations um are always appreciated so if you're able to do that it is much appreciated all right so that's a bit of the basics about how to get Braille Blaster uh making sure you're on the latest version um how to report issues that come up how to find document ation and and all those little things and with that we will get to the next question one second alrighty our next poll question is how off what do you uh u

se brail blaster for yeah how sorry my fault how often do you use braille Blaster how how often do you use braille Blaster never daily weekly or monthly and I see Jay you asked are more people using BB versus Braille 2000 or duckberry and that is actually one of our poll questions so we want to know the answer to that too uh duckberry traditionally is the most popular uh when we've asked folks um and and I think that'll remain true uh it's definitely very popular but we're we're always happy to

hear what folks are using and I would I would like to apologize um because I started the poll and then I thought you guys were changing the question so I ended it and it took me a few moments to figure out how to relaunch it but we have active participation so appreciate it did you um did you see the question about the integration of nus files in the Reliance on lib Louie to enhance the creation of educational materials for blind blind students in other words how does Braille Blaster integrate w

ith that did you see that yes yes and we're going to get into that as a part of our demo today but they're asking about nus files and lib Louie so if you haven't heard of nimus files nimus files are available through the nyac so the nyac is a uh it's basically a collection of textbooks and they're in a format that is meant to be difficult to access so they're put in a format basically called nus XML and the whole idea is there's no reader that just opens nus XML files and the reason there's no r

eader that opens nus XML files is because textbook Publishers don't want to create a file that people can use to Pirate their textbooks but it is a great file type for Braille and so it's it's it's a great file type for lots of things but for our purposes it's a great file type for Braille and so we can open nus XML files and while we don't display them to you as a textbook so you can't use brail blaster for piracy uh for example what we do is we take all that markup so all the Styles inside the

file and we use that uh to create the Braille formatting and it's that process that is the best thing that Braille Blaster does the number one thing that Braille Blaster does is take a file take the Styles within that file and convert them for Braille the whole idea is hopefully you have a good file and will need to touch it the least amount possible inside brail Blaster to finish it and so that's kind of the goal that we're moving toward is like just being able to get as much information out o

f the file uh convert it for Braille and leave the least amount of work for you to get that Braille to a student a lot of folks are putting in their their answers in the chat thank you for that and we have some poll results to share with you guys too so how often do you use braille Blaster about 35% of the attendees said never 19% said daily 27% said weekly and 18% said monthly that's great um and now I'm gonna go ahead and run Braille Blaster and we have like a a super tight security at Braille

blast or AT AP and so Braille Blaster will actually take us a moment to run as far as we know we're the only place where this happens so if this is happening to you let us know because I would love to know if it's happening to other people so we can fix it uh at the moment it's not a high priority because it only happens to us and basically only exists to embarrass me during webinars uh so just let me let us know if this uh ever happens to you where it runs very slowly on Startup ah Deborah tha

nk you it happens to you as well so good thank you I it but we had no idea if it happened to anyone else uh and so thank you for confirming now we can make that a high priority to fix um all right so what I've done is I've actually restarted Braille Blaster so it is a fresh it's a fresh uh start and so one thing that happens the very first time you run Braille Blaster is it's going to say Braille Blaster first run and it's going to give you a number of options and it's going to ask you to fill t

hese options out and I'd like to run through those together so it's a real basic interface and then it just says check automatically for updates and you can choose yes or no so this I think yes is the correct option and so the idea is you select yes and then every time you run Braille Blaster what it'll do is it'll basically ping our server and it'll find out if there's an update if there's an update it'll then tell you an update is available it's Channel specific so like I was talking earlier w

here we update the beta all the time and we update the stable only rarely um if you're on the stable Channel you it'll only check the stable Channel and so you're not going to hear about all these beta updates since you don't care about the beta updates you'll only hear about the stable updates but it's totally worth doing if you would rather not that not happen like if you have a data cap or just very slow internet or something like that you can just say no and then you can manually check um wh

en Braille Blaster has an update available I'm going to go ahead and say yes you click next and then it asks and this is very important so it's data sharing consent consent so to make Braille Blaster better AP would like to understand more about users of Braille Blaster if you agree Braille blaster will send some data about the features of the software you use along with your answers to the following user survey uh and so it's I am over 18 and would like to help make bra Blaster better by sharin

g data with ap and so your options are yes or no and so basically I would love it if you said yes but what it's doing is it's going to send anonymous data to AP about how you're using Braille Blaser and part of this is where we're a very small team we have to direct our efforts like you know the example of the top of BR Blaster running really slow at startup that has annoyed me for a year but we didn't really know if it was happening to anybody else we tested it with other folks and it all those

tests came back negative so I needed a big group like this to to confirm that yes it is happening to other people but we we really have to prioritize what we work on um because our team is so small and so by knowing how you are using Braille Blaster that'll give us some sense of where we need to put our time so it's good to say yes and it is all Anonymous so we'll click next and if you do say yes it then gives you a survey where you put in your job title so you can say you're a teacher the visu

ally impaired a Jed teacher omm instructor Braille transcriber you know and so on and then you can so I'll put Braille transcriber because that's what I am and then you can put I am from and then you pick your region so northeast southeast Southwest so on Alaska Hawaii US Territory International uh I'm gonna pick you know Northwest or no Midwest I forgot where I live I'm gonna pick Midwest it's controversial but people think I think some people think Louisville's in the South I think it's in the

Midwest and I I'll fight you over it um and then you click finish when you're done and then bra Blaster will run and and let's say you don't like the options you selected uh you can actually go once bra Blaser starts up you can actually go up to help privacy settings and you can change everything so you don't have to um it's not like you select those options and you're stuck with them forever you can go in and you can turn off automatically checking for updates by unchecking this box that says

automatically check for updates or you can uncheck the box I want want to help make brail Blaster better and then you can also set up your error information and how errors will appear so you've got some options there so you know whether you've used Braille Blaster before um we'll go through kind of the basics as quickly as we can and just kind of this is going to be more of a like teach a person to fish so we're not going to be able to teach you how to do every single thing that bra Blaster can

do because it can do quite a lot it's a complicated program from that perspective um but what we'll do is we'll try to give you get you oriented so that if you've never used it before you can get in there and play with it and learn more about it on your own and then after we've done that for a bit then we will spend the last uh bit of the the webinar going over um what's coming in the future so the first thing is you'll open the program and you'll have these three blank views um they're difficul

t to talk about without having some text on the screen so I'm going to go ahead and put some text on the screen this is brail Blaster and nothing happens right away we're back to the old Behavior so if you've been using V2 where it was translating as you typed we've reverted back to the old Behavior part of that was a performance issue um it was fine for most documents to translate as you typed but for very very large documents like textbooks uh it got to be very laggy even on very fast computer

s so it was in the best interests of everyone if we reverted back to the old behavior of not translating until you pressed enter or moved your cursor so I just pressed enter the font is super small by default and that's probably pretty okay for most of the time but it is not great uh when you're doing a presentation so to increase the font size you can go up to view in the menu uh there's a few options there you can turn off the different views uh you can adjust the toolbar you can make the uh i

con smaller uh and you can also turn off the Braille font which will show the asky font instead I just leave the bra font on most of the time I don't find asky to be that useful but sometimes it can be so that option is there and then the main thing we care about is down at the bottom increase font size decrease font size and so increased font size is Control Plus the equals sign or plus sign there you don't have to hit shift even though it does say the plus sign which normally would require shi

ft and I just hit that a bunch until I made the font bigger so that hopefully folks are able to see it so the other behavior that is different now is so since we're not translating on the Fly um now when you type it will just keep going and going and going and there is no right margin so there's no right margin until you press enter and then we translate and everything matches up so like over here you've got going going is the beginning of both lines and so that's one of the advantages of Braill

e blasters you've got this print view where you're doing all your work you're typing all your text you've got your Braille view where you see the translation live and that's kind of the big advantage of Braille Blaster is having these two views so that while you're working you know while I'm working with brail Blaster what I do is I keep my focus on the print view because um when you're working your main focus is really those Styles so it's applying the Styles it's making sure everything's um ap

pearing correctly your blank lines your margins that sort of thing and then when you're proof reading you can uh flip over to the Braille View and make sure everything is exactly as you expected so that's kind of the chief advantage of brille Blaser so I've got the the two items in there now I'll go ahead and add a third item if you've seen me uh deliver a webinar about BR Blaster before this is a familiar aspect but we've got a decent enough number of folks that have never been here before um s

o we talked about formatting so I've got three items the default style of brail Blaster is body text which is a paragraph um the big thing about brail Blaster is automatic formatting so we've brought back all the Styles and part of why we have brought back the Styles is anti is an anticipation of eail if you haven't heard about ebra I'll throw a link in the chat later but it's daisy. orgil and that's where you can learn more about it but it's a new Braille file type that we're working on and tha

t Braille blast is going to support but we need all these Styles if you're not a brail transcriber um some of these Styles aren't going to make any sense to you um that's where that formats 2016 document comes in but the main ones you're going to be a want to be aware of are the basic category so that's where you got your body text your blocked text your centered text The Heading category where you've got heading heading one heading two heading three and the list category so list one is just goi

ng to be your standard list and then as you go up to you know two levels three levels you start to get additional so you could have list 2 a list 2 B and so on the question came in the chat uh can a visually impaired person use braille Blaster absolutely uh Braille Blaster is fully accessible you know multiple members of the Braille Blaster team are visually impaired and use screen reader um we actually have we tend to have bugs that only affect sighted people so we've had a several bugs where w

e had an accessibility issue that didn't affect screen reader users but did affect sighted people so you know it's a mixed bag but it is a fully accessible program uh and if you do notice any issues please report them uh because if you find it it means we're not aware of it all right so those three categories are really the main three categories that you're probably you know if you're a casual user that you're probably going to care about but feel free to explore and try out the different catego

ries um so what I'll do now I've got my three paragraphs I'm going to go styles list list one level on the second item I don't need to highlight that item I don't need to do anything I just need to have my cursor on that item so now I'm going list one and then it automatically applies that style and the moment that happens it's going to do several things it's going to put in blank lines it's going to put blank lines uh before the item after the item and then it's going to change the margins of t

he item those are all the rules from that formats 2016 document um that are required for a list and it's going to do this dynamically like I can go to this this is a third item and then I can apply that same style again like I can go styles list list one level list one or I can go Styles repeat last style so the hotkey for that is controlr on Windows and so I can just click that and that applies that same style again and as it does it changes the margins it removes the blank line uh and then tha

t um gives us the formatting of a single list uh with two items uh Beth asked the question if we fixed some of the issues with translating to nouth code uh and I'm glad you asked that and it takes me back to the uh the other question so we're now on the latest lib Louie so if you go to about Braille Blaster we're now using the latest lib Louie um if it's not you know if they put out a version recently we may not have that but we we have we're no we used to be very far behind and on our own branc

h and now we're on the main lib Louie Branch because lib Louie has made a lot of progress and has just gotten better and better and so we want to support that and so we have folks on our Dev team uh Ken who is here works with the folks at lib Louie um to help you know improve it and I think our translation is in many ways better than it's ever been before I'm sure there's things that we aren't aware of uh or that we need to work on but I think it's gotten to a really good place and we're happy t

o be a part of the liie mission if you're not familiar with lib Louie I encourage you to check it out um lib Louie is a opsource braille Braille translation service and as a part of that it is meant to work with Braille worldwide so they have tables for ueb and for other languages and getting EXT additional contributors to it is always great and yeah thank you Michael we use mathat for math which has greatly helped with math transcription both nth and ueb Technical so I do think you'll notice im

provements uh especially over 2.0 all right so I've got my two list items what are we doing on time um I've got my two list items I'm going to change this item to a heading so I'll change it to a heading two and then that changes the margins of that item and it removes the blank line between it and the list items so that's just kind of the basics uh one other change I would like you to be aware of from V2 and this may change in a future version but in V2 you could just activate the emphasis and

then type and it would automatically apply that emphasis to the text uh in this version uh we're back to the older Behavior where you need to type the text first and then highlight it and then you can apply the emphasis uh to the text so that is a change that I want to make sure folks are aware of all right I'm not going to go through all of the settings but just be aware you know we've got the settings page you know so page properties where you set up this your page size and your lines per page

sales per page uh whether or not you're using entero uh translation settings is where you can set your code so UE ueb and contracted uh U plus nemith Spanish Etc page numbers we have a number of settings related to the location of page numbers most users aren't going to need to mess with anything here this is more for advanced users but you know if you need to it is available and then we have a newer setting under format settings for predominant quote your options are none single and double and

this is related to a rule in Braille translation where your predominant quote so double quotes or single quotes gets translated as a single cell symbol and the other one gets translated as a double a two cell symbol um it's you know if you're in the United States or Canada it's primarily going to be double if you're in the UK it'll be single or if you're translating a book from the UK it'll be single so that's just a nice little option the last setting that's important to go over is your emboss

er settings and this is where you set set up your embosser it's a pretty straightforward process but I don't have an embosser set up at the moment so I would just use the ad button which brings up a little dialogue where you put in the name so we'll call it page Blaster since that was referenced earlier and then you pick your embosser I am at home where I do not have an embosser but I will pick my printer just as an example and then you pick your manufacturer so I'll pick AP and then I will pick

my model my options are pix Blaster and Page Blaster and I'll pick page Blaster then you click okay so that's how you set up your embosser and you can set up as many embossers as you need to and then you can switch between them either from this dialogue or during the act of embossing when you're done you can click okay and now I can go to I want to show so file save or save as will save your file as a bbz bbz is a proprietary file type for Braille Blaster um but it's it it is a good way to save

your work to open in Braille Blaster later and you can also go to emboss so if you go to emboss it'll open a dialogue where I've already set up the embosser it's already got that there and then I can just print from here with the okay button one other feature I want to make sure you're aware of is the Braille preview the Braille preview is like print preview and it's a good way to check out your Braille and to proofread your Braille Braille Blaster can open brf and brl files um if you do open a

brf or a brl you can't edit it but what it'll do is it'll open it in the Braille preview so it can be a good way to review your file from the Braille preview with that let's go to another poll question and then we'll get into a little bit more about bra Blaster and where we're heading um one moment if you want to launch the next poll I'll get the PowerPoint ready all righty we are on our next poll question and the question is what do you uh what do you use brille blaster for new documents short

documents textbooks technical materials like math and other and if you've you know there are a lot of folks who have never used Braille Blaster so don't worry about this poll question you can skip this one uh and if you are using other as your answer uh please put that in the chat and let us know in the chat which one you're using so Denise asks in the chat if you said other already but don't actually use bra Blaster that's fine um and so Denise ask I make quite a bit of flash cards is there an

y templates that allow embossing with uh perforation lines and is brail Blaster able to produce any type of Graphics um so that's a good question so first about graphics um at the moment we have very very limited support for tactile graphics and we'll we'll talk about that a little bit uh but it's so specific that I wouldn't even recommend using it at the moment um so that's so the the short answer is no we do not support any type of tacal Graphics at the moment but it's something we are working

on adding um for your other question are there any templates that allow embossing with perforation lines so for that we don't have templates so we don't have any kind of template to easily switch your settings I could see how uh a feature like that would be useful but it's not something we have at the moment so what you can do though is you can set up your page margins um to allow for those perforation lines um but there's not a lot we can do at the moment to make that easier or to make it easy

to switch from having the lines to not having the lines um one thing I would suggest is set up a document the way you need it to be set up for your perforation lines save it as you know perforation line template and then when you're ready to make a file that needs that open that original file and just change the Braille you know you don't have to completely recreate the file from scratch just go in and you know put in the new words whatever put in whatever it is you you care about that would be

the quickest way to switch back and forth between things all righty and it looks like we have our poll results so again the question was uh what do you use braille blaster for and 60% of you guys said new documents 71% also added in that they do short documents 26% for textbooks 38% for technical material and 26% was other all right great thank you everybody and a lot of folks using it for new documents and short documents make sense we're really happy that folks are using it for textbooks um S

arah asks about uh getting it to number a set of math problems so that it will use the numeric indicator um this so using the numeric indicator and the number and the punctuation indicator has been been a longstanding um issue that we need to address um so that is something we're aware of part of it was I'll uh part of it was my fault for misunderstanding the initial rules uh for using UE with nth when the rules first came out so we had some uh design flaws that were my fault um but we definitel

y need to Circle back and address that problem because it should be something we can handle automatically all right so the next piece is support so we talked about brf and brl let's also talk about the other file types we support So at the very top of the list I've opened I've gone to file open and it shows all the file types we support it is a lot of files um bbx and bbz are the Braille Blaster file type now one important thing to know about uh Braille Blaster 2.1 is it's not backwards compatib

le with 2.0 so if you're in the middle of you of making a document in 2.0 go ahead and finish that document before you move over to 2.1 now the good news is you can actually have 2.0 and 2.1 installed installed side by side so it's not like you have to choose you can go ahead and keep 2.0 installed and have 2.1 use 2.1 for new documents use 2.0 for any old documents you may need to re-edit um apologies for that but uh getting that uh to work uh would be a ton of work uh and we weren't really sur

e how useful it would be especially since most folks will end up wrapping up their files and then just moving over so be aware of that we talked about br F and brl uh we also support docx ePub HTM HTML markdown Open document files and if you're not familiar with these file types don't worry about it too much just know like the main ones are Microsoft Word files epub files HTML files from the web and then txt and then nus XML and nus zip so nus XML we talked about that at the top but that's from

the nyac and then html's websites and let's get into some examples so a favorite example of mine to show is a docx file and I'm actually going to go ahead and open it now and that it's called analyzing the text and it's a really basic file but it shows a good way to use braille Blaster so bra this file I've opened it from word and it is a super basic file but you can make this file entirely in um Microsoft Word and then open it and then not have to do any work inside Braille Blaster so let's say

you've never used bra Blaster before you don't want to learn how to use braille Blaster you're not interested in using bra Blaster that's totally fine what you can do is you can go to word which you probably familiar with and you can make your file there so all I've done is ADD standard styles to this file so we've got analyzing the text that's a heading one we've got the next item site text evidence that's just a paragraph then we have a list with some bold in it then we have a heading two for

performance task a heading three for writing activity and then we have another couple paragraphs well few paragraphs that's all this is so you can do this All In word save it and then open it in braille Blaster and all that gets carried over you don't have to do anything in Braille Blaster so Cindy asks any plans to open Adobe PDF PDFs are a nightmare they are the absolute worst um so what I suggest is if you have a PDF open it in word their budget is way bigger than and even they don't quite o

pen PDFs correctly most of the time but they do they do well some of the time they do a pretty good job a very visual PDF they'll mess up but if you've got a good accessible text based PDF they'll do a pretty good job open it in word save it as a docx open that docx in Braille Blaster they they you know they're a a you know I think a trillion dollar company now so they're they're their ability to open PDFs a bit better than ours um hey Willow can I just clarify you were over in word you were usi

ng those Styles and I think what you're saying is is that when you open the document in brail Blaster and you translate it uh it will maintain those Styles or bring in some sort of formatting that is very important for Braille based on the styles that you've selected in word like exactly bra Blaster is that intelligent yeah so the heading one from word is now a heading one in Braille which is a centered heading the paragraph is body text so you got your 31 we've kept the uh emphasis our list is

still a list with all that emphasis The Heading two is a heading two which is a cell five heading heading three is a cell seven and then we've got our three paragraphs and it automatically does the the Braille page numbering so there's not a lot you have to do here um and this is a very effective way to utilize Braille Blaster and to benefit from Braille Blaster without having to learn how to use braille Blaster um we're running short on time so sorry about that um if we didn't get a chance to a

nswer your questions I want to direct you back to the contact us form so please feel free to send us any questions through that um I'll go ahead and put my email in the chat especially since everybody already saw my emails um so use my work email uh which is now wree ap.org I changed my name to Willow free uh and I'll do my best to answer your questions from there and let's launch our last poll question because I think we all want to know the answer to this and I'll try to answer other questions

in the chat while while that's going so our last poll question is what all right yeah our last poll question is what transcription software do you use duckberry braille Blaster Braille 2000 tiger software suite or other and again check all that apply if you don't use any Braille transcription software uh you will make me very sad but put that in the chat and then we'll at least know that you have not used transcription software and you're looking into using transcription software and you though

t about BR Blaster and that that'll that'll make up for the fact you haven't used it yes we still have materials in the hive we still have videos online about Braille Blaster so there are a lot of ways to learn how to use BR Blaser and there's a lot of webinars out there still still that you can find through the AP channel that are still relevant as well all righty it looks like we have some results so what transcription software do you use uh 61% said Duxbury uh 63% said Brill Blaster 18% uses

Braille 2000 33% uses tiger software suite and 5% uses other that's great we won end that poll now um so the main thing I want to make sure folks take away thanks for that is get the latest version we're going to be putting out updates more frequently um We're not gonna we're not going to necessarily stick to a strict schedule um our main focus is going to be just getting out new features and fixes and as they are relevant and worthwhile putting out new updates so make sure you get on the latest

and then our goal over the next about a year or so is to be developing our main goal will be developing the tools that are needed to create the ebril file type if you've not used eil I'm going to direct you to the daisy site and I'm going to put that in the chat and that is a great way to learn about eail and what it is we're trying to do and it gives you all the information you need to get involved and to learn more so that's going to be our Focus over the next year is just giving you the tool

s you need to be able to make ebil um and getting familiar with Braille Blaster now will help make that process easier even though I do think it'll be ultimately a fairly easy process I want to thank everyone for joining us today um and thank you for all the questions and I'll try to answer questions in the chat as folks are are heading out thank you all so much well everybody thanks for joining us today for today's webinar I hope that you enjoyed our partner showcase and like Willow said if you

have any questions definitely feel free to fill out that contact form and we will definitely promptly be in contact with you guys so have a great rest of your day and we'll see you soon Willow I will take the U the transcript from the chat and I'll forward it over to you I think we caught everything but um just in case um and then uh we'll do a follow-up email with the audience so um I'll probably rendo with you as well as to what you'd like in that um in that in that video all right cool I mea

n in that followup email yeah all right great thanks everybody all right everyone have a good one all right bye bye thanks Amanda bye