[BRLTTY] Regarding the Monarch

[Elijah Massey]

I have the Monarch as well since yesterday so here are my thoughts on it. For me, the time to refresh seems more like 1 second to me than 2 seconds, especially when talking about one cell changing. For example, when I type into a text field it never seems to take more than one second for the letter to appear in Braille on the display, and the same when navigating around the Chess board in Monarch Chess. Also, if you have your finger on a Braille cell while it refreshes, it will not refresh correctly, but I've found that if you move your finger away it will often fix itself within one or two seconds, which I think makes this a little less of an issue. Things like blinking cursors would still not be desirable though. What I am really curious to find out is when the JAWS beta comes out later this summer supporting the Monarch, what protocol will it use? Will it use the Dot Pad protocol, since it uses the same cell technology and the Dot Pad protocol is already optimized for an array of equidistant dots like this? Or will it be an adaptation of the Humanware protocol that is used in the brailleNote Touch, Brailliant devices, and APH Chameleon and MANTIS? Or will it be something completely new? This will determine how easy it will be to support in BRLTTY, since I doubt the protocol will be publically documented so figuring it out will likely involve some reverse engineering unless its exactly the same as the Dot Pad protocol. But whatever it is, I really hope the protocol will expose the entire 96 by 40 dot array, and not be limited only to displaying Braille.

Also, I don't mind that the device runs Android, with a few caveats. I think its useful to have a book reader, word processor, Braille editor, math editor, etc on the device itself, especially with the new Ebraille format being developed that will support including tactile graphics in Braille books, better navigation, and dynamic line length. Also, I think the ability to make graphs in KeyMath is an extremely useful feature, and its much easier to read a graph on the Monarch than to listen to an audio graph from Desmos or interpret a graph line by line on the BrailleNote Touch. You can also run third-party Android apps by side-loading APK files, and I was able to install F-Droid on it and install other apps from there. The experience is pretty good, since its still very responsive in third-party apps and the entire display is used. Space utilization could be better though, because often buttons will say "View unlabeled" before the actual label, or have the label duplicated, and it would be nice if the layout of the Android screen could be replicated somehow, like if a toolbar of buttons at the top of the screen could be shown as one or two long lines in Braille. I also wish the API for apps displaying graphics was open so you could write apps that display things, but I suppose an app could always just generate a PDF and open it in the tactile viewer.

However, one thing that this device running Android raises a concern about is I really hope this device continues to be updated in the future. I had the original BrailleNote Touch, which ran Android 4.4, and it was never updated past that version. In fact, the software was never updated at all when the BrailleNote Touch Plus came out, and I think the BrailleNote Touch Plus is still on Android 8.1. I'm definitely glad the Monarch is on Android 13, since that will have good support for a while. My BrailleNote Touch also seemed to get slower over time, and become unresponsive and crash more often, and after a few years of use it was almost unusable even after a factory reset, and I've heard similar things from people who have the BrailleNote Touch Plus. I hope the Monarch doesn't end up like that.
Sent from my iPad