On Tour

The Canute Console on Tour 2022-2023

The first Braille Console is here and we want to invite you to be one of the first to see it or, meet its potential users. 

We are inviting local Braille readers, blind people, tech firms and media to attend as a series of tour dates up and down the country, and beyond, so you can ask questions and help us spread the word about the prototype and our Crowdfunder.

We are always looking for organisations that champion accessibility and inclusiveness to collaborate with us to help bring this machine to people who need it.

Join us at one of our tour dates below!

We’re in Houston, USA, from the 3rd to the 11th of July!

Bristol Braille will be continuing the Canute Console tour at the National Federation of the Blind Convention in the Hilton Americas-Houston.

We will be demonstrating maps of Houston, spacial video games, match replay for football games, programming in Python, drawing graphs and floor-plans. Plus a sneak preview of our next mission, involving a certain geographically appropriate final frontier…

For more information about the Console see https://bristolbraille.org/about-canute-console/

The great thing about the Convention is how fluid it is. So we’re not announcing specific locations for the demos just yet. Watch this space. But we will be doing a demo every lunch time and evening, in either the Hilton or the neighbouring Marriott Marquis and you don’t have to wait before arranging a personal demo.

To attend one of these demos and give us your thoughts on the possibilities for the brave new world of multiline electronic Braille, contact us via:

•  UK Tel: +44 (0)117 325 30 22
•  USA Tel: +1 617 936 7064
•  Email: enquiries@bristolbraille.org

We are also staying in Houston after the Convention, so if you live nearby or are staying longer, please get in contact and we’ll arrange a personal demo with an opportunity for you to feed back your impressions to us.

• Dates: 3rd to the 11th of July.

Previous events

• 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th of May: Sight City Frankfurt. See Google Calendar for available meeting times. Email ed.rogers@bristolbraille.org to book.
• 26th of April: IET Stevenage for FIRST LEGO League Canute Console showcase. Email enquiries@bristolbraille.org to book.
• March 2023: Dublin Braillists, ChildVision, Dublin.

March 10th – 24th 2023 – USA. We are thrilled to announce that after a long hiatus, we will be back at CSUN and we have been invited to showcase our work at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March 2023.

17th January 2023 – Peterborough

We are gearing up for the next leg of our Canute Console tour and will be heading to Peterborough, UK on the 17th of January to give you the chance to try the Console in person as well as try the Canute or get some help with the one you have. Ed Rogers and Steph Sergeant will be hosting the event. 

From November 2022 to January 2023 we toured the very first prototypes around the UK, including the TAVIP conference, Ufi showwcase and many more.

• 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th of March, 2023: UK House, Austin, Texas (SXSW). Email enquiries@bristolbraille.org to book.
• 15th, 16th, 17th of March, 2023: Conference Center, Anaheim, California (CSUN). Email enquiries@bristolbraille.org to book.

The Braille Arcade

Bristol Braille Technology has been working on something really exciting in the last few months, we’ve taken the Canute 360 and prototyped a dock that expands the applications on the Canute.

From there we’ve created a tactile gaming device which, so far, has successfully run versions of Snake, maze crawling games, Hangman and even our city explorer! Top-down gameplay is a fascinating way to exploit Braille as a gamer gaming or try gaming as an avid Braillist. We want as many people as possible to have a chance to try this whilst it is being prototyped and feedback on what they imagine using it for.

Therefore we want to create the first travelling Braille Arcade and take our Canute Gaming Dock on the road to schools, businesses and communities. These tactile experiences are scripted on the Canute 360 itself in common computer languages like Python, making it the first multiline Braille workstation. We hope that these experiments will open up interest in computer science to whole new groups of people.

We believe that computer gaming should be accessible to everyone. We also believe in the model we used to design the Canute 360 over the last decade: Taking prototypes to Braillists early on and making and remaking to reflect the desires and experiences of our community.

So we will be launching a Crowdfunder in the next few weeks to fund the Braille Arcade coming to a town or city near you. We hope that Canute and Braille enthusiasts will share the link far and wide to help us reach our goal.

We would love to speak to anyone in business that wants to work with us and sponsor us to bring this brilliant new technology to everyone. If you are a Braille user yourself with an interest in taking part, once the crowd funder is successful, then we want to talk to you.

We have created a signup form below and will send another email once we go live. If you have any questions in the meantime, please do get in touch.

Braille is literacy, education and employment. Video games are computer science. Let’s make Braille video gaming happen!