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. Incidentally, 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.
