It’s all about the nine lines! Canute’s 360-cell revolution

The World’s First And Only Affordable, Multi-line Braille E-reader

Canute 360 is ideal for use at home or the office.

For professionals, home readers and college students Canute can drastically increase the availability of Braille material. It reads all pre-formatted Braille Ready Files (BRF) and Portable Embosser Files (PEF), meaning you can read texts from Bookshare, the RNIB Library or any other Braille library in the world.

The Canute’s ‘hard’ signage quality Braille makes Canute ideal for Braille beginners and those coming back to it.

Why should Braillists read text files one or two words at a time when print readers read a paragraph at a time? Why should Braillists laboriously scan a spreadsheet one cell at a time when their sighted colleagues see the whole table?

Literature, musical notation, charts, graphs, mathematics, tables and spacial diagrams. All these are hugely more practical on a nine-line refreshable Braille display than on a single-line display, reams of embossed paper or through text-to-speech. Using transcription software such as Duxbury DBT or Braille Blaster any digital text file can be transferred to and read on Canute.

Designed and manufactured in our workshop in Bristol, you can be confident that the people who made your machine care as much about good Braille as you do. 

Testimonials For Canute 360

Reading the Canute is way more fun than going to gym lessons!

— Aliyah, Primary school pupil, Wolverhampton

I don’t want to gloat, but I really love the Canute 360 […] I put a whole load of BRF files on a card last week to read […] It has so much potential!

— Canute customer on the Braillists forum

Good for musicians, maths, programmers, reading and literacy. Reading music Braille is amazing, as is tabular information. I must say, reading several lines of Braille without having to advance to the next line is fantastic. It’s the first time I’ve read a novel in Braille for a long time, as I got sick and tired of having to push next every single blasted line.

— David Woodbridge

The time, energy, and devotion you have put into this machine is absolutely clear. Thanks so very much! It’s wonderful! It has allowed me to have a library without literally thousands of volumes.

— Canute customer

Make Reading For Pleasure, A Pleasure!

The Canute 360 electronic Braille reader is designed to be used as a Kindle for blind people.

Before Canute 360 electronic Braille was only a single line or even only a handful of characters. Imagine trying to read a book from a calculator display!

Although the remit of the Canute has expanded to include many other uses, the heart of the Canute has always been to make reading pleasurable.

With Canute 360’s multiline design, instead of puzzling to reassemble awkwardly divided words and sentences, the reader rapidly reads texts, even with both hands, while having an overview of the whole paragraph. Canute’s display show’s a third or more of a Braille page’s layout… Not one twenty-seventh of the layout!

Before Canute 360 multiline Braille was only available in bulky paper Braille books (a bible can be up to 5ft/150cms high when written in Braille, and common paperbacks often more than four volumes!) Imagine the space needed for even the smallest personal library.

With Canute 360’s SD card and USB pen drives the reader can carry hundreds of BRF books, files that are easily downloaded from their favourite online libraries. No more lugging around volumes of paper Braille, finding somewhere to store them, or needing to wait for deliveries of Braille books.

In addition, the Canute 360 allows the reader to read books continuously as the page refreshes from the top, place bookmarks, switch between them and chapters and skip between books with the menu system and enjoy reading their favourite novels.

Reading Braille has never been such a pleasure!

Tables, Lists And Maths

The Canute gives a 2-dimensional display so by using both hands, the row and column of a table can be read simultaneously. This makes it much easier to build up a mental picture of a table, just as you can with a paper copy.

You can scan up and down lists without pressing a button to reach each entry, and scan up and down columns of figures in complex formulas and scientific equations. Simultaneous equations and other Mathematical expressions that require more than one line can be displayed in a much more meaningful way on the Canute.

Bar Charts And Tactile Diagrams

Using blocks of all 6 dots, very easily read spacial graphs can be created, including bar charts, with words and numbers for the row and column headings. Bristol Braille has developed a series of custom formats for the display of tactile graphical data which we are in the process of releasing for the Canute.

Braille Music And Technical Subjects

The Canute has many potential uses beyond reading for pleasure. Did you know you can read graphs, charts, tactile diagrams, music and even programming languages?

The Canute 360 allows you to read multiple lines of content whilst retaining the correct formatting, making it an invaluable tool for any Braille reading person working in music or STEM.

The Canute makes it possible to read roman numerals, identify figured bass on music sheets and read charts and tables from simple BRF files. The Canute can open up access to problem sets, a familiar tool used in Universities for physics, math, engineering, chemistry, and computer science subjects.

The Canute can also be used to help with proofreading documents, allowing Braille readers working in music to access both the notes and lyrics of a piece which makes it easier and quicker to line up the two for embossing etc.

The time, energy, and devotion you have put into this machine is absolutely clear. Thanks so very much! It’s wonderful! It has allowed me to have a library without literally thousands of volumes.