2Electronic braille notetakers are small, portable and battery operated devices with braille keyboard for entering information. They use a speech synthesizer or braille display for output. The Braille notetaker can be used by blind or visually impaired people who read braille. It allows the user to write, review and edit data, keep a virtual address book, and store many pages of Braille or print. User options include, a talking clock, calendar, telephone directory, scientific calculator, and stopwatch. It can be used as the speech synthesizer for computer and provide acces to mainsteam programs such as e-mail, and the Internet. A regular ink-printer will produce typewritten output when the built-in Braille-to-print translation feature is available.

A variety of notetakers are on the market and offer different features.

The BrailleNote.

A PDA designed for blind people. It is a notetaker and comes in different configurations to suit your needs. The BrailleNote has a refreshable braille display which acts simular to a computer screen. Also with the braille display the BrailleNote has built-in speech.

You can get the BrailleNote classic, or mPower (which has more features and is newer), in either a BT moddle (which is a 6 dot braille keyboard) or a QT Moddle (a normal qwerty keyboard). You can also choose the size of your braille display from 32 cells or 18 cells. meaning you would either be able to fit 18 or 32 characters on 1 line. The BrailleNote runs on a system called Keysoft which has been developed by Humanware with accessibility in mind. Keysoft has been built around the Windows CE operating system. (information source: BrailleNote Stuff)

Using the BrailleNote More about BrailleNotes (HumanWare) . . .	BrailleNote mPower with JAWS Part 1
BrailleNote mPower with JAWS Part 2	BrailleNote mPower with JAWS Part 3