Welcome to the forty-eighth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
In this week's episode:
- Join us for our AI in employment boutique 0:00
- Introduction to Orbit Speak 2:13
- Orientation 4:55
- The Main Menu 9:59
- Onboard help 11:25
- File Manager 17:10
- Book Reader 18:20
- Editor 26:29
- Media Player 29:39
- Podcasts 30:35
- Internet Radio 35:10
- Utilities 37:41
- Settings 48:21
- Conclusion 55:36
- Closing and contact info 58:34
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Live the life you want.
Speaker 2:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week a comprehensive review and demonstration of Orbit Speak from Orbit Research. We take you through the key features of this pocket-sized Braille input speech output device. With Orbit Speak, you can take notes, read books, enjoy podcasts and other entertainment. But is the product right for you? We offer objective analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 48 of the podcast. And just before we go on to the main event, a reminder that the National Federation of the Blind's Center of Excellence in Non-Visual Accessibility is having another boutique. This one is on October the 27th at 2:00 PM Eastern and the subject this time is AI Tools In Employment. AI tools are increasingly part of everyday life.
They can assist with everything from researching information to shopping, to taking notes. They're also of use for job-related tasks. So join us to learn how you can use artificial intelligence, AI tools, for employment. Topics we'll cover in this webinar include writing and editing documents and presentations, taking notes and summarizing meetings, using deep research to find information and using AI tools to overcome accessibility barriers.
You can register for this boutique by going to nfb.org/cena. You'll then want to choose the events and training link. If you can't attend in person, it would still be worth registering if you have an interest in this topic because we will make a recording available to you after the event. Nothing quite like turning up though so that you can participate in the Q&A. So we look forward to you being a part of this on October the 27th.
Today we're going to be taking a look at the Orbit Speak. Orbit Research has established a reputation for delivering access technology at reasonable price points. Their breakthrough TrueBraille technology has enabled signage-quality, refreshable Braille at fractions of traditional costs resulting in the successful Orbit Reader line of Braille displays. The Orbit Speak represents the company's continued mission to make innovative high-performance access technology accessible. Orbit Speak is a product that in our community we've come to call a note-taker.
As is the case with other products in this category, the Orbit Speak does far more than just take notes. This device has Braille input and speech output, so this is not a Braille display. Orbit Research announced Orbit Speak at CSUN in 2022, so it predates the return of the Blazie family to this category of product and there was a lot of call for something like the Braille 'n Speak, but with a modern twist to come back.
Orbit Speak comes in two versions, standard and plus, and both versions share identical physical specifications. So let's look at the dimensions. It is a small device, 6.7 inches long and 2.9 inches wide. It's 0.6 inches thick and if you do centimeters, it is 17 by 7.5 by 1.5 centimeters. It weighs exactly 7.4 ounces, that's 210 grams, so it's comparable to a modern smartphone. The design means that it will fit comfortably in a pocket or a purse. Orbit Speak standard costs 599 dollars.
The base model provides comprehensive note-taking functionality with built-in productivity applications and full device connectivity capabilities. Orbit Speak plus is 749 dollars. The enhanced model includes all of the standard features, plus it has entertainment and advanced productivity tools. Notably, the plus units currently ship with standard features plus a music player, an internet radio tuner, a podcatcher, a voice recorder, and an enhanced book reader.
And because it's the same hardware, if you choose to purchase an Orbit Speak standard to begin with and then you decide that you want plus, perhaps you can't afford the whole thing right now but you'd like to save and purchase the upgrade later, you can do that. It'll cost you $199. So it does cost $50 more to upgrade later than if you'd made the plus purchase initially.
Let's give you an orientation of the Orbit Speak as if you had the unit on a desk in front of you and we'll start with the top surface because at the very back of that top surface you have a standard six-key Perkins keyboard and if you're familiar with the Orbit Writer, it feels quite similar to that. What I'm going to do is just Braille on it a little bit, fairly close to the mic, you can hear what it sounds like.
So it's quite quiet. You can Braille up a storm without making too much noise. The keyboard is not too clicky. Between dots one and four, you have a navigation pad. You've got up arrow, down arrow, left arrow and right arrow and a button in the middle that serves as a select key. So when you press that, you will normally execute the choice that you have arrowed to, and right below that is the space bar. On the immediate left and right of the space bar are dots seven and eight respectively.
This takes a bit of getting used to, but the advantage of it is that of course it narrows the width of the unit, which makes it easy to fit in a pocket. But if you want to backspace or press enter, which are the traditional functions when you're using contracted Braille, then you'll have to get used to resting your thumbs on dots seven and eight rather than just go to the left of dot three and dot six, as many of us are used to on larger keyboards.
There are function keys to the left and right of dots seven and eight. So you have F1 and F2 on the left-hand side, F3 and F4 on the right, and they're often used on their own or in conjunction with modifiers such as the space bar, backspace and enter to perform system functions. All of that is clearly documented in the manual. And that's all you have on the top surface. It's a very simple layout. If we go to the left-hand side of the unit, there is a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and the power button.
The power button has a tactually distinctive nub on it, so it's really difficult to miss. If the device has been shut down completely then you will hold this button in and you'll feel a series of vibrations. It does take a little while to start up from a cold start, but that's typically not how you would use the unit anyway.
Once it's started up, you can tap the power button, it goes into a hibernation mode where it doesn't use too much battery and then you can tap it again, it will wake up, and in the traditional note-taker style that blind people have become used to, you'll be put right back in the application that you came from and if you're reading a book or editing a file, you'll be placed exactly where you were before you hibernated the unit. On the right-hand side, there's a USB-C port.
You can use this for charging the unit and you can also connect other accessories to it. For example, to record this demo, I'm connecting a Focusrite Vocaster Two that I have at my office here at the Jernigan Institute via USB-C, and the USB-C port is detecting that it's an audio device and behaving accordingly.
The specs say that you will get 15 hours of battery life if you play this thing at full blast on its little speaker continuously. What that means is that if you're using it for normal purposes, taking the occasional notes, writing documents, doing a little bit of media, you're likely to get far more than that and it will certainly easily last you through a work or school day. Maybe even a couple of those.
There's an SD card slot in the front of the unit and they say that it will take up to two terabytes of storage and there's 32 gigabytes of storage on the unit itself. That's plenty of storage for books and a little bit of media that you might like to place on the device. You have two text-to-speech options with multiple variants. You've got Runa TTS from AccessMind, which is effectively Vocalizer and that gives you the Vocalizer voices that many of us are familiar with.
By default, certainly in the US market, it comes up talking with the Zoe voice. I have changed it to the Daniel UK English voice and that's the one that we'll be using for the demo. It also supports Google Text-to-Speech and if you like your voices sounding very human and natural, that is an option that you can consider, particularly if you're going to read a lot of books with this device.
I've noticed though that when you switch to the Google Text-to-Speech, you will see a significant reduction in responsiveness. So if I arrow around here right now with the Daniel voice selected, you can hear that that is very responsive. Indeed, it is snappy and quite a pleasure to use. Not so much if you choose the Google Text-to-Speech, but that's the trade-off for more natural sounding voices.
So as you hear, we have the Orbit Speak up and running now and I'm going to go to the top of the menu. It's good to see that Orbit has deployed Braille conventions that many of us are familiar with that date all the way back to the VersaBraille in the 1980s. So if I press dots one, two, three chord for those not familiar with that concept, that means to press dots one, two and three together while holding down the space bar. We'll get to the top of this menu.
Speaker 4:
File Manager F, one of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
To move through the menu, we could press dot four chord, to move back we can press dot one chord and also we can use the up and down arrow keys between dots one and four. That's what I'm going to do. I'll arrow down.
Speaker 4:
Book Reader R, two of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can reduce the verbosity of this if you don't want to hear the shortcut key because you're familiar with it and you don't want to hear the position in the list. You do have settings to disable that.
Speaker 4:
Editor, E, three of nine. Media player, M, four of nine. Podcasts, P, five of nine. Internet radio, I, six of nine. Utilities sub-menu, U, seven of nine. Settings, S, eight of nine. Help sub-menu, H, nine of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
There are some sub-menus here and when you find the sub-menu you can right arrow to invoke the sub-menu or you can press enter, which is dot eight, to the right of the space bar. If you were to purchase an Orbit Speak and you wanted to start to learn this, you can download the user guide in a variety of accessible formats from the Orbit Research website. If you can get yourself to this menu, you'll also find it here. So I'm going to press enter to invoke the help menu.
Speaker 4:
User guide, U, one of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's dot eight of course to the right of the space bar.
Speaker 4:
Audio tutorial, T, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's have a quick listen to how this goes. So we'll press dot eight once again to invoke the audio tutorial.
Lisa Salinger:
Hello and welcome to this tutorial on the use of the Orbit Speak. I'm Lisa Salinger and I'm pleased to be your guide as we go through all the features of this fascinating little unit. This tutorial is sponsored by Orbit Research and-
Jonathan Mosen:
I just pressed the space bar to pause the audio. So it's very simple to get listening to the audio tutorial if that's how you want to learn. And of course the purpose of what we're doing here on Access On is not to duplicate that audio tutorial because we have limited time. This is just to give you an overview of some of the things that the Orbit Speak can do.
So if you want to go into greater depth then you can check out this audio tutorial if you'd like to learn that way or you can load the user guide and search it. You can use some of the navigation commands that we will talk about to navigate that user guide as well.
And while we're in this audio tutorial, let's have a look at some of the ways that you navigate audio. This is a convention that we see throughout Orbit Speak. By using up and down arrow, you can choose the granularity, if you will, as kind of an Android term and then if you use left and right arrow you can navigate by that amount. So if I down arrow now.
Speaker 4:
Time, five seconds, time, 10 seconds.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I press the right arrow key.
Lisa Salinger:
... that will be just enough to get-
Jonathan Mosen:
The playback resumed and I navigated by 10 seconds. Now if I down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Time, 30 seconds, time, one minute. Track.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can navigate by tracks if you are in a playlist of some kind.
Speaker 4:
Playback speed.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now there is playback speed. So let's have a listen to what this sounds like when Lisa is sped up.
Lisa Salinger:
... you up and running.
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 110%.
Lisa Salinger:
And some of the other things that you will need to continue in your learning.
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 120%.
Lisa Salinger:
... a bundle or there is some sort of promotion going on you may also find other-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 130%.
Lisa Salinger:
... wall adapter, case, SD card, lanyard.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll just pause and say hats off to Orbit Research for giving this degree of configurability in terms of the playback speed.
Lisa Salinger:
... wired and blue-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 140%.
Lisa Salinger:
... responsibilities. So knowing what you have purchased or what is part of a promotion is a good thing and-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 150%.
Lisa Salinger:
You will want to contact the place where you purchased your Orbit Speak to correct any inaccuracies.
Speaker 4:
Playback speed 160%.
Lisa Salinger:
Orbit Speak is a small rectangle, about the size of your average smartphone, although a bit thicker. Let's start with the easiest-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 170%.
Lisa Salinger:
... so that the keys are facing down. You'll find that the back is pretty much flat. There are four little rubber feet on the unit and-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 180%.
Lisa Salinger:
That's pretty much all there is on the bottom. There is not a user replaceable battery so there is no receptacle for such. Turning over the unit, I would-
Speaker 4:
Playback speed, 190%.
Lisa Salinger:
... of the learning so that we're kind of all on the same page so that the power button and the headphone jack are on the left. So the power button is-
Jonathan Mosen:
Playback speed, 200%.
Lisa Salinger:
... itself has a dot in the center and that will be sort of in the upper left when you have the unit.
Jonathan Mosen:
Playback speed is now at 200% and that is actually as fast as it will go.
Speaker 4:
Playback speed at maximum level.
Jonathan Mosen:
I guess it's possible that may not be fast enough for some people who really do like to crank up their audio. So you can go to 200%. You can also go down to 50% playback speed if you want to slow it down maybe for dictation purposes or perhaps you're learning a language and you want it slowed down. Here's what it sounds like if we slow Lisa down to 50%.
Lisa Salinger:
... is a standard headphone jack. If you move your fingers around to the lower left-hand-
Jonathan Mosen:
If I down arrow at this point-
Speaker 4:
Time five seconds.
Jonathan Mosen:
... that is also a characteristic of the Orbit Speak. The menus do wrap, so if you keep going down, you'll eventually work your way around all the menu options. As is a fairly traditional convention, you can press Z chord to exit an application. You can also press the four sign chord dots one, two, three, four, five, six together with the space bar to get back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, help sub-menu, menu audio tutorial, T, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
And you're taken back to where you were before. So if I press the left arrow key.
Speaker 4:
Help sub-menu, H, nine of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we are back on the main menu and we can continue to arrow through the menu or press first letter navigation. All of these functions have unique first letters so you can learn what they are and bypass arrowing around the menu altogether and they're mnemonic in most cases. So if you want to go to the podcast player, you could just press P and get straight there. There's not even any requirement to press enter because they're unambiguous commands.
There is no command that starts with the same letter on the main menu. I won't spend too much time on the file manager, but it is a comprehensive file manager. You can copy and rename and work with files. You can also use the USB port on the Orbit Speak to connect it to your computer and when you do that, your Orbit Speak will come up as a drive and you'll be able to navigate the files that way using File Explorer on your Windows device.
That may be way easier for many people, especially if you want to get a lot of content on the device. Well you can copy it from your Windows computer if you have a lot of BRF files, maybe you downloaded those from BARD or something like that because is no BARD support in the Orbit Speak natively. So you could copy BRF files into the device. You could copy media files. You could also go in reverse.
It does record, it has a microphone on this device. So if you've made a recording and you want to take that recording somewhere else, you can do that as well by copying from the Orbit Speak to somewhere on your computer. Now, some people will prefer to do that over using the file manager, but both options are valid and available to you.
Speaker 4:
Book reader, R, two of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
The book reader supports a wide variety of file formats and they include DAISY, PDF, EPUB, DOCX, so that's the format that Microsoft Word creates, BRF, Braille ready files, and BRL files as well and good old standard text files. I don't believe that Markdown is supported in here. I haven't seen any reference to Markdown being supported. Orbit Speak has some online services built in, but there isn't any NLS support built in at this point, be it Braille or audio.
There's a workaround for the Braille but not the audio because the audio uses a codec that needs to be licensed and if that codec doesn't exist on a device then it won't play NLS BARD books. But if you want to use Braille books on this device then you can certainly download them on a PC and transfer them across to the Orbit Speak. This time I'm going to push the select button in the middle of the arrow keys to invoke the book reader
Speaker 4:
Categories list. My bookshelf selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
More down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Online services. Downloaded the books. Recently read. My bookshelf selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it has wrapped back to the top. I'm going to go down one-
Speaker 4:
Online services.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and we'll have a look in here.
Speaker 4:
Online services list. Project Gutenberg, one of one.
Jonathan Mosen:
Project Gutenberg is set up. For those not familiar, this is a service that gives you access to a large number of titles in the public domain. So if I press select on this.
Speaker 4:
English, one of 10.
Jonathan Mosen:
There are 10 available languages. I will choose English
Speaker 4:
Hymns and hymn writers of Denmark, one of 11.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's been able to go here because we have Wi-Fi connected. I've got the Orbit Speak connected to the Wi-Fi here at the Jernigan Institute. Setting up Wi-Fi is very easy to do. It will show you available SSIDs that are visible. If you need to enter a key for the Wi-Fi then you can do so in computer Braille and you are set up. So that's how we are on Project Gutenberg.
Speaker 4:
Elizabeth Longfrock, two of 11. Bill Brown's radio, three of 11. With the Turks in Palestine, four of 11. Stories in verse, five of 11. Autumn leaves, original pieces in prose and verse, six of 11. Professor Royce's Libel, A Public Appeal for Redress to The Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University, seven of 11. Leah Mordecai, A Novel, eight of 11. Outings at Odd Times, nine of 11. Travels In a Treetop, 10 of 11. Show More, 11 of 11.
Jonathan Mosen:
And that's what happens. So there are a maximum usually of 10 or 11 items on a menu and then you'll get a show more option. This is a good opportunity for me to introduce a concept that's important within Orbit Speak and that is the context menu. To invoke this, you press M chord and it's a little bit like, I guess, a combination of tapping the alt key on a Windows computer or sometimes like tapping the application key on a Windows computer and you will get a menu based on where you are on the device. So if we do it from here, it will be pertaining to Project Gutenberg and the fact that we're in an online service. So I'll press M chord now.
Speaker 4:
Context menu, add online service, L. Search, S. Settings, T. Speech options, P. Exit, Z. Add online service, L. Search, S.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to press enter to search Project Gutenberg-
Speaker 4:
Search dialogue, search edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and I'm going to see if I can find some Oscar Wilde. So I'm just going to Braille in Wilde.
Speaker 4:
W-I-L-D-E.
Jonathan Mosen:
Because we're in a dialogue at this point. This is another opportunity for me to introduce the concept of dialogues in Orbit Speak and you navigate dialogues in the same way that you would on your PC or your Mac, any graphical environment in fact. You would depress the tab key and in Braille that is dots four five chord typically.
Speaker 4:
Okay button, cancel button, search edit, Wilde.
Jonathan Mosen:
So that's all we have and if I press dot eight or enter, it will invoke the default button, which is okay.
Speaker 4:
Start searching. Please wait. Selected poems of Oscar Wilde, one of 11.
Jonathan Mosen:
All right.
Speaker 4:
Selected poems of Oscar Wilde, two of 11. Oscar Wilde, A Study, three of 11. In Good Company, Some Personal Recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts. Watts Dunton, Oscar Wilde, Edward Wimper, S. J. Stone, Stephen Phillips, four of 11.
Jonathan Mosen:
I won't go through all of those results, but we found Oscar Wilde pretty quickly. Probably a good chance for me to reread The Importance of Being Earnest in which Gwendolyn Fairfax famously says, "I always keep a diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train." He was so witty, wasn't he? All right, if I push B chord at this point, we can go back a level.
Speaker 4:
Categories list, online services selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we're back on the categories list. What I'd like to do now is see if we can add an online service. So I'm going to invoke the context menu once again by pressing M chord.
Speaker 4:
Context menu, add a book, add online service, L.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's what I want to do, so I'll press dot eight to do that.
Speaker 4:
Add online service dialogue, online services list, Sugamya Pustakalaya, one of four. Project Gutenberg, two of four. Bookshare, three of four. 3,715 RU, four of four.
Jonathan Mosen:
Those are the four online services that Orbit Speak supports at the moment. Orbit Research tells me that NFB-NEWSLINE support is very close, so that's exciting because it means that you can access all the publications that we offer through NFB-NEWSLINE and read them on this little device. So that will be coming soon. In the meantime, I'm just going to see what it's like to add my Bookshare account.
Speaker 4:
Bookshare, three or four, log and dialogue, username, edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
So I'm going to type my username and pause the recording while I do that. I should mention that I entered my username, which is an email address in computer Braille and that means that if you want to enter the at symbol, you would press dot seven and dot four together, since we're in computer Braille. I then press dot four five cord and it asks me to enter my password, which I have now done. So let's press dot eight and see if it logs us in.
Speaker 4:
Please wait. Category's list, online services selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm optimistic. Let's see what's in there now.
Speaker 4:
Online services list, Project Gutenberg, one of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
Sounds good, and if I down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Bookshare, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now if we go into Bookshare.
Speaker 4:
My assigned books, one of six. My reading lists, two of six. My history, three of six. Latest, four of six. Popular, five of six. Categories, six of six.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can now search for and download books because we are in Bookshare now. If I perform an F chord for find or I could go to the context menu and search that way. We can search for a title on Bookshare, find it and download it and start reading it. In the case of Bookshare, you can choose to download in EPUB format or DAISY. The choice is yours. If you exit a book and do something else with your Orbit Speak and then you come back, the book will pick up from where you left off and you can also create bookmarks.
That might be an additional safeguard, but it's also particularly useful if you are studying and you want to put bookmarks at various reference points in your book. It's all supported. There were shortcut keys. If you don't remember all of those shortcut keys initially, you can invoke the context menu and they're there. That's a very cursory look at the book reader. I'm going to go back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, book reader, R, two. Editor E, three of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
The editor is next. Let's take a quick look at this.
Speaker 4:
Untitled, editor.
Jonathan Mosen:
With a device like this, you really want to be able to get in there and start writing as soon as you need to write something down, and you can certainly do that with Orbit Speak. Just power it up, make sure you're at the main menu, press the letter E for editor. You don't even need to press enter or any other confirmation key. You are in a blank document right away and you can start writing. An important point to note, if you want to write in contracted Braille, that is not enabled by default. The default Braille table is set to English unified uncontracted. You can go to the settings menu at any time and if I press O chord, we can get there.
Speaker 4:
Settings, general options, O.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'll down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Speech options, S. Braille settings, L.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we'll just check what we have here.
Speaker 4:
Braille settings, dialog, translation, table, combo box, English, unified, contracted, five of 11.
Jonathan Mosen:
When you're in a combo box like this in Orbit Speak, you can just press left and right arrow keys to make an adjustment. I'll just press tab.
Speaker 4:
Okay, button.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we'll accept that.
Speaker 4:
Translation table has been successfully saved. Set date and time options. Braille settings, L.
Jonathan Mosen:
All right, we're back in settings. So I will go back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, Editor, E, three of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
Three, I'll press E.
Speaker 4:
Untitled, editor, edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now I can definitely Braille in contracted Braille.
Speaker 4:
Test, T-H, space, I-S space, capital J-O-N-A-T-H-A-N, space.
Jonathan Mosen:
So as you can hear, it's speaking the contractions as I write them. And now if I perform a C chord, which is a standard convention with these sorts of devices to read the current line-
Speaker 4:
This is Jonathan.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, we have it in contracted Braille and it has automatically back translated it. If we save this, it'll turn into a text file so that we can take this somewhere else. I can press s chord.
Speaker 4:
Save as dialog, file name, edit, new text document txt.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I press the tab key.
Speaker 4:
File type, combo box dot txt dot brf dot brew.
Jonathan Mosen:
And those are the three file types that you have. So you can save as a contracted Braille file. You can save as a plain text file and once you've done that of course, you can take it into anything on your PC to work with. I'll just quit this save dialog if I can.
Speaker 4:
Canceled.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now I'm going to just briefly show you the context menu and many of the functions are available with shortcut keys as well that you can commit to memory if you use this device frequently enough.
Speaker 4:
Context, menu, file sub-menu, F. Edit sub-menu, E. Search sub-menu, S. Read sub-menu, R. File sub-menu, F.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we've wrapped around to the file menu. So you can select text, you can copy it, you can do basic notepad/scratchpad functions with this and get something written down when you need to. Let's go back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, editor, E three of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
We have covered the media player as we were passing through Lisa's excellent audio tutorial that is built into the Orbit Speak, but I will mention here that the media player supports a wide variety of audio and video files. All the things that you would expect like MP3 and M4A files and FLAC files as well. It goes back and supports Windows media files and a range of other quite obscure formats as well.
So chances are good that the Orbit Speak Media Play will play most things that you throw at it and when you're in a media file you can up and down arrow to choose how you want to navigate and then left and right arrow to actually act on that navigation.
So you may use this for spoken word content but you could equally use it for playing music and if you're doing that you may find the shuffle mode very handy. It does have that built into the player as well. The next item on certainly the Orbit Speak Plus, which we have here at the International Braille and Technology Centre is this.
Speaker 4:
Podcasts, P, five of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's open this.
Speaker 4:
Podcasts, podcasts, list, Access On the 15th of October, 2025, 9:07, one of one. Found new episodes for one podcast.
Jonathan Mosen:
I have Access On already subscribed here as we've been testing and evaluating the Orbit Speak at the IBTC and the conventions are consistent. So if I want to find a podcast, all I have to do is press F chord.
Speaker 4:
Search for podcasts, dialogue, search term, edit, blank.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I'm going to type Nation's Blind-
Speaker 4:
N-A-T-I-O-N apostrophe S, space, B-L-I-N-D.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and press enter.
Speaker 4:
Searching. Please wait. Found 10 podcasts. Results, list Nation's Blind podcast, the National Federation of the Blind, education, 100, not explicit, one of 10.
Jonathan Mosen:
Very straightforward. Just go into the podcast client, press F chord, search for the podcast you want. Nation's Blind podcast is the first result that came up. When I searched for Access On it was pleasing to note that Access On was also the first result that came up. So if I want to subscribe to this podcast, I'll just press enter at this point.
Speaker 4:
Successfully added podcast, Nation's Blind podcast. Results, list, Nation's Blind podcast, the National Federation of the Blind, education, 109, not explicit, one of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm in a dialogue now so if I press tab, dots four five chord-
Speaker 4:
Add podcast button, close button.
Jonathan Mosen:
... there's the close button. So I'll press enter on that.
Speaker 4:
Podcasts, podcasts, list, Access On, the 15th of October, 2025, 14:51, one of two. Nations Blind podcast, the 15th of October, 2025, 9:56, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
And those are our two podcasts here. If I press enter on Nation's Blind-
Speaker 4:
Episodes, list, Increasing Accessibility in Higher Education, the 15th of October, 2025, 9:56, one of 100.
Jonathan Mosen:
... we've got a hundred episodes that we can arrow through and enjoy the Nations Blind podcast at this point. I am going to go back though because there's something else I want to show you.
Speaker 4:
Podcasts, list, Access On, the 16th of October, 2025, 12:03, one of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
So we'll choose Access On.
Speaker 4:
Episodes, list, new Apple OS feedback, No More Public Beaters of Jaws and NLS feedback, the 15th of October, 2025, 14:51, one of 48.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I press enter, the podcast will start to play.
Speaker 4:
Playing episode, new Apple OS feedback, No More Public Beaters of Jaws and NLS feedback.
Speaker 1:
One.
Speaker 2:
Access On.
Jonathan Mosen:
Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast.
Speaker 4:
Pause.
Jonathan Mosen:
Here is the thing that I was delighted to see. I'm going to press enter with C, and you do see this sometimes in Orbit Speak, for example, if you want to create a new file in the editor while you are in the editor. You can press enter with N to do that and you can press enter with O to open a file, thus bypassing the menu. So I'm going to press enter with C at this point.
Speaker 4:
Chapters, dialogue, chapters, list, BARD Mobile, one of 24.
Jonathan Mosen:
It was a busy podcast last week, wasn't it? So I can down arrow.
Speaker 4:
NLS digital talking book machine, two of 24, locked out of view due to inaccessible ID verification, three of 24.
Jonathan Mosen:
And I can press enter on that.
Speaker 4:
Playing episode. New Apple OS feedback, No More Public Beaters of Jaws and NLS feedback, play.
Jonathan Mosen:
A serious issue to raise now from Sean. He says, "Hello, Access On. I have been blocked from requesting-"
Speaker 4:
Pause.
Jonathan Mosen:
There we go and we jumped straight to that chapter. Also, if I continue to play, I can press dot four on its own to navigate between chapters.
Speaker 4:
Play, camera in the iPhone 17 range.
Speaker 6:
A wonderful...
Jonathan Mosen:
So it announces the chapter as we move to it. I'll press stop. Again, Amazon first oven smart oven.
Stan Latreille:
Take one. This is Stan Latreille and I want to-
Speaker 4:
Pause.
Jonathan Mosen:
It is an excellent podcast implementation with this podcast player on Orbit Speak. Let's go back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, podcasts, P, five of nine. Internet radio, I, six of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's an internet radio client as well. I'll press enter and show you this briefly.
Speaker 4:
Internet radio, categories list, browse station selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can browse by country. You can also search for a particular radio station and once again the convention applies here so if you know of a radio station that you want to listen to, you can press F chord, you can type in the name of the radio station and it will tell you if it has it in its database or not.
The browse feature is fun. For those of us of a certain vintage, it kind of takes you back to the short way radio days where you'd scan the dial, maybe do a bit of DXing and find out what is around. Also, it's handy if something newsworthy happens in a particular country and you want to hear coverage of that event. You can drill down by country and take a look at what is there. If I down arrow now.
Speaker 4:
My stations, favorites.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we've got favorites. And if I go in here.
Speaker 4:
Favorites list, Mushroom FM, one of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
And then.
Speaker 4:
NFBRN, the National Federation of the Blind Radio Network, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
All I have to do is press enter on NFBRN.
Speaker 4:
Player, dialogue.
Speaker 8:
This is much higher than the average subminimum salary under the present law. Current law is unjust and patronizing the blind workers. It isn't affront to the thousands of sightless workers.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's the National Federation of the Blind's radio station, NFBRN, the National Federation of the Blind Radio Network, available 24/7 with NFB content. Now there is something else here that is a very nice feature in the internet radio tuner. If I press M chord.
Speaker 4:
Context menu, play.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Start recording.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yes, you can record and you can do that onto an SD card if you have oodles of storage on the SD card. And also as I said earlier, there is 32 gigabytes of storage built right into the Orbit Speak so you can record on here as well. It's a very nice feature if you just happen to be listening to something interesting. We hear from people sometimes who say things like, "What was that speech that we just heard on NFBRN?" If you have a device like this, you can go ahead and just start recording and you can listen to it whenever you would like to. Let's go to the main menu once again.
Speaker 4:
Home, internet, radio, I, six of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to press dot four chord just for variety's sake-
Speaker 4:
Utility sub-menu, U, seven of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
... which is another way to navigate down through the menu. And this is utilities, it's a sub-menu so I'm going to press the right arrow key to expand it.
Speaker 4:
Check battery status, B, one of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can also press a CH chord for check anywhere in the system to get this information.
Speaker 4:
Battery level, 87%, not plugged in.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's pretty good actually because we've been doing some extensive evaluation of Orbit Speak prior to recording this for you. So it holds a charge very well. I'll down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Check current time, T, two of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's pretty straightforward. You can also press a T chord from anywhere to get the time.
Speaker 4:
Check current date, D, three of nine. Calculator C, four of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
The calculator is a basic one that has a range of typical functions that you would expect to find on a basic calculator and it works the way that you would expect.
Speaker 4:
Calendar, I, five of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's have a look at the calendar function. To the best of my knowledge, this calendar function does not synchronize with anything such as your Google calendar or your Microsoft Exchange calendar. So you'd want to use this if you're using the device pretty much in isolation from anything else or you've decided that the calendar is just so straightforward and so good that you are going to make it your primary calendar. If you do have a situation though where anybody is sharing appointments with you, you would have to enter those manually into the device.
Speaker 4:
Calendar, the 16th of October, 2025, Thursday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's arrow around. So first left and right arrow.
Speaker 4:
The 17th of October, 2025, Friday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
Yeah, right arrow moves me by day. I'll go back.
Speaker 4:
The 16th of October, 2025, Thursday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now if I down arrow.
Speaker 4:
The 23rd of October, 2025, Thursday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're going forward by a week.
Speaker 4:
The 16th of October, 2025, Thursday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's bring up the context menu and find out what's here.
Speaker 4:
Context menu, new event, N. Go to date, G. Exit, Z. New event, N.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's press enter and see what this new event input screen is like.
Speaker 4:
New event dialogue, event title, edit.
Jonathan Mosen:
And it does appear to want computer Braille here. So I'm going to type.
Speaker 4:
A-C-C-E-S-S, space, O-N, space, D-E-M-O.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we can press C chord now. That's interesting. Why doesn't C chord work?
Speaker 4:
O.
Jonathan Mosen:
It doesn't though. So let's go back with B chord-
Speaker 4:
Cancel button.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and forward with dot four, five chord.
Speaker 4:
Event title, edit, Access On demo.
Jonathan Mosen:
Okay, and then we'll press the tab key again.
Speaker 4:
Event description, edit. Event location, edit. Alert tone, combo box tone one.
Jonathan Mosen:
And if we left and right arrow.
Speaker 4:
Tone two, tone three, tone one.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we can press tab.
Speaker 4:
Event start month, combo box 10.
Jonathan Mosen:
Left and right arrow will change that.
Speaker 4:
Event start day, combo box 16. Event start year, combo box 2025. Event end month, combo box 10. Event end day, combo box 16. Event end year, combo box 2025. Event start hour, combo box 12. Event start minute, combo box 13. Event start, 10:00 PM, combo box PM. Event end hour, combo box 12. Event end minute, combo box 13. Event end, 10:00 PM, combo box PM. Event alert time, combo box on exact time. Okay button.
Jonathan Mosen:
Just setting expectations around this calendar then there doesn't appear to be any support for recurring appointments. So if you have an appointment on the third Wednesday of the month for example, it doesn't appear that you can set that up and that is how you add an appointment. We'll just go to cancel-
Speaker 4:
Cancel button.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and I'll choose that.
Speaker 4:
Confirm. Do you want to save data before exit? Yes button, no button.
Jonathan Mosen:
I was just tabbing around there but I'm sure I can also just press N.
Speaker 4:
The 16th of October, 2025, Thursday, no appointments.
Jonathan Mosen:
One thing about the calendar as well is that you can't press F chord and search for a string. So if for example you wanted to find out, "When's my doctor's appointment?," you don't seem to be able to press F chord, type doctor and find the relevant appointment. So just setting some expectations there about what the calendar can and cannot do. Let's go back to the main menu.
Speaker 4:
Home, utility sub-menu, calendar, I, five of, alarm clock, A, six of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
The alarm clock works fairly similarly to the calendar in fact. You can go in there and set multiple alarms. The unit, as long as you haven't powered it all the way off of course, which is the case for anything, will wake up and sound an alarm. And you have three alarms that you can set that sound a tone, plus you can have the unit just vibrate. And I will say the vibration engine in this is very strong so you'd have no problem if the unit was close by, hearing it. If it's in your pocket you would definitely feel it vibrate.
There is a frequency combo box for this function but it is a little limited. A lot of people have an alarm that they want to go off during work days and maybe a little bit of a sleep in on the weekend would be nice but with this you can set it to go off on a specific day and you can choose what day that is.
You can set it to go off every day but there is no weekday only function that excludes Saturday and Sunday. And the next option.
Speaker 4:
Contacts, O, seven of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
This is where you can add contacts to your Orbit Speak. Once again, I don't believe that this is synchronizing with anything and of course there is no email function and no phone function on this device. So even if you make a note of somebody's phone number or email address, you're going to have to have it speak that to you so that on another device you send email or you make a phone call. And the next option on the utilities menu, which is quite a busy wee menu in fact is.
Speaker 4:
Voice recorder, R, eight of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
We're going to have a look at this one. So we'll go in here.
Speaker 4:
Voice recorder, not recording. Record button, view recordings button, settings button, not recording.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's see what the settings do.
Speaker 4:
Settings button, settings, dialog, default storage for saving recordings, combo box, internal storage, recording file name format, combo box, sequential number, recording format, combo box, WAV audio.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's see what else it does.
Speaker 4:
MP3 audio, two of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
MP3 audio will take a lot less space than will a WAV file. So if you want to use this to record lectures and you're concerned about storage, then you can set this to MP3. That really will be fine for basic spoken word recording but I'm going to go back-
Speaker 4:
WAV audio, one of two.
Jonathan Mosen:
... and press tab.
Speaker 4:
Gain factor, combo box, no gain.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's see what we can do here.
Speaker 4:
Two x gain, four x gain, three of five, eight x gain, four of five, 16 x gain, five of five, 16 x gain, five of no gain. One of five.
Jonathan Mosen:
We'll leave it at no gain and I'll press tab.
Speaker 4:
Okay, button.
Jonathan Mosen:
And those are the settings.
Speaker 4:
Voice recorder, settings, button, not recording, record button.
Jonathan Mosen:
I'm going to make a recording and then I will copy that recording onto the computer that I'm recording this demo with and you can hear exactly what the recording sounds like, not just me playing it back on the Orbit Speak, which at the moment is connected to the audio interface but we'll actually bring it right into the recording so you can have the best opportunity of hearing how this records. So let's see how this works.
Hello, this is Jonathan. I've pressed the button in the centre of the little joy pad so we should now be recording on the Orbit Speak. I'm going to talk a little bit longer so you can have a real understanding of how well or not this works. This is the first time I've actually tried to record anything on the Orbit Speak, so we are learning together.
The Orbit Speak is just in front of me on my desk and what you find when you use a microphone such as this typically is that there is a little bit of acoustical bounce in my office, which the excellent noise reducing Heil PR 40 microphone that I use kind of masks. All right, that's enough. Let's push the centre button again and we should now be stopped.
Speaker 4:
View recordings, button.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's see what's here.
Speaker 4:
Recordings manager, dialogue, recordings, list, voice recording, one, WAV, internal, one of one.
Jonathan Mosen:
And that's called voice recording one. So I'm going to stop the recording, copy this to my PC and let's have a listen to what that sounds like. Hello, this is Jonathan. I've pressed the button in the centre of the little joy pad so we should now be recording on the Orbit Speak. I'm going to talk a little bit longer so you can have a real understanding of how well or not this works.
This is the first time I've actually tried to record anything on the Orbit Speak. So we are learning together. The Orbit Speak is just in front of me on my desk and what you find when you use a microphone such as this typically is that there is a little bit of acoustical bounce in my office, which the excellent noise-reducing Heil PR 40 microphone that I use kind of masks. All right, that's enough. Let's push the center button again.
That's pretty reasonable and actually it wasn't picking up too much acoustical bounce, so that's what it sounds like if you make a recording with the Orbit Speak and you can do that in WAV or MP3 format. The only other option on this utilities menu is to format an SD card, which you may want to do the first time you're inserting a new SD card into the Orbit.
Speak to ensure maximum compatibility. Just before we conclude this review of the Orbit Speak plus, let's take a look at a few configuration options. You can adjust parameters like the speed and pitch with keyboard commands that are available universally on the device. I'm going to hold down the space bar and press F4 at this point on the very right-hand side of the device.
Speaker 4:
Speech rate, seven.
Jonathan Mosen:
That is speeding up the speech rate. We'll see how fast it goes.
Speaker 4:
Speech rate, eight. Speech rate, nine. Speech rate, 10. Speech rate, 11. Speech rate, 12. Speech rate, 13. Speech rate, 14. Speech rate, 15. Speech rate, 16. Speech rate, 17. Speech rate, 18. Speech rate, 19. Speech rate, 20.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we're at to the maximum speed possible. So if I just move around the menu a little.
Speaker 4:
Editor, E three of nine. Video player, four of nine. Contacts, P, five of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
That's how fast it goes. I've just paused the recording, slowed it down to its slowest possible level and this is how slowly it goes.
Speaker 4:
Editor, E three of nine.
Jonathan Mosen:
So that is speech rate one. Throughout this demonstration we've had the Orbit Speak Plus at the speech rate level six. You can also adjust volume and pitch with similarly accessible commands right throughout the system. Let's have a look at settings now. We can go to settings from the menu, but you can also perform an O chord, which is for options and get there.
Speaker 4:
Settings, general options, O.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's go into general and have a quick look at what's here.
Speaker 4:
General options, dialog, airplane mode, combo box, disable.
Jonathan Mosen:
This will turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and that will extend your battery life because the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth use radios and they do have some battery drain.
Speaker 4:
Wi-Fi combo box, enable. Typing echo combo box, characters selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
As you become more familiar with the Orbit Speak, you may want to change the typing echo and the options here are characters, which we've been using throughout the demo and that is the default
Speaker 4:
Words, characters and words, characters.
Jonathan Mosen:
We've now looped back to characters. There does not appear to be a way to turn typing echo completely off, which would be my preference if I were using this full time.
Speaker 4:
Capitalization. Alert combo box, save cap selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
Here we have that and-
Speaker 4:
Off pitch, save cap.
Jonathan Mosen:
... now we'll go to the next item.
Speaker 4:
Main volume combo box, two.
Jonathan Mosen:
This is for the main volume of the unit. There is a separate speech volume.
Speaker 4:
Control type, announcement combo box, enable. Access key announcement combo box, enable.
Jonathan Mosen:
If you don't want to hear, for example, book reader R, when you are arrowing through the menu, you can disable that here.
Speaker 4:
Position announcement combo box, enable.
Jonathan Mosen:
If you don't want to hear one of nine, two of nine, etc. You can disable that here.
Speaker 4:
Sleep timeout combo box, 10 minutes selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
If you don't touch the unit, the unit will go to sleep after a period of time to find here and then you can press the power button to wake it up again. Let's see what options we have.
Speaker 4:
20 minutes, 30 minutes, always on, 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes.
Jonathan Mosen:
And 10 minutes is the default. We'll leave it there.
Speaker 4:
Language combo box, English selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
We can change the language.
Speaker 4:
Okay button.
Jonathan Mosen:
And that's the end of that dialogue.
Speaker 4:
Successfully saved. General options, O. Speech options, S.
Jonathan Mosen:
Let's have a look at this one.
Speaker 4:
Speech options, dialogue, engine combo box, Runa TTS with vocalizer selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
All the vocalizer voices that many of us are familiar with are here. But I will switch to the Google TTS so you can hear what that is like. I'll press right arrow.
Speaker 4:
Speech recognition and synthesis from Google.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we can go and choose other options pertaining to this. It doesn't take effect immediately.
Speaker 4:
Language combo box, English, United Kingdom selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
I would choose the US voices, I think, in this case. I'll right arrow.
Speaker 4:
English United States.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we'll down arrow.
Speaker 4:
Voice combo box, voice zero selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
Well, we'll see what that is like in a moment.
Speaker 4:
Speech rate combo box, six selected. Pitch combo box, five selected. Volume combo box, 10 selected. Okay button.
Jonathan Mosen:
And we'll press okay and then the speech will take effect.
Speaker 4:
Changing TTS engine. Please wait.
Jonathan Mosen:
We'll see if we get any feedback or whether I have to press a key. I'll press one now. No, it still hasn't taken effect. There we go.
Speaker 9:
Volume combo box, 10 selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
So that's a little slow, isn't it? Let's try speeding that up. I'll push space with function key four.
Speaker 9:
Speech rate, seven.
Jonathan Mosen:
That seems to have woken it up actually. So push space with F1.
Speaker 9:
Speech rate, six.
Jonathan Mosen:
And now we're running one of the Google voices.
Speaker 9:
Okay button, cancel button, engine combo box, cancel button, okay button.
Jonathan Mosen:
It's less responsive, but as you can hear, the speech is very clear and there are a range of voices. What makes it a bit difficult to preview these voices is that they don't take immediate effect. So for example, if I up arrow.
Speaker 9:
Volume combo box, pitch combo box, speech rate combo box, voice combo box voice zero selected.
Jonathan Mosen:
If I use right arrow to change it-
Speaker 9:
Voice one, voice two, voice three.
Jonathan Mosen:
... it's not changing. The only way to make it change is to press enter to dismiss the dialogue
Speaker 10:
Successfully saved.
Jonathan Mosen:
Now we hear the new voice.
Speaker 10:
Set speech options, S.
Jonathan Mosen:
So it does make it difficult to audition the voice to hear which one you like.
Speaker 10:
Braille settings, L. Date and time options, D. Wi-Fi settings, W. Bluetooth settings, B.
Jonathan Mosen:
I will just talk about the Bluetooth settings briefly to say that at the moment they allow you to pair audio devices to your Orbit Speak and I have successfully paired the Phonak hearing aids that I use to the Orbit Speak Plus, which means that the output of the Orbit Speak goes directly to the hearing aids.
The Bluetooth protocol in use by these Phonak hearing aids means that there's a little bit of lag, but it's not an intolerable amount of lag and it is good to have the audio going straight to the hearing aids. I should say that these Phonak aids are using a standard Bluetooth protocol, so if you are using hearing aids that are exclusively made for iPhone, this probably won't work with Orbit Speak.
Speaker 10:
Software update, you.
Jonathan Mosen:
When we got the Orbit Speak plus it took us through two software updates. I think one of them was actually a firmware update. It's very straightforward to do once you're connected to Wi-Fi and you can have the Orbit Speak tell you when a software update is available the moment you power it on. It's just a matter of choosing to update and wait. The device will restart itself in time and it was all very straightforward.
Speaker 10:
Install additional Runa TTS voices, R.
Jonathan Mosen:
You can have other voices from Runa TTS, which is essentially Vocalizer.
Speaker 10:
Advanced options, V.
Jonathan Mosen:
The only advanced option that I see at the moment is the ability to reset to defaults, which is important if you want to start over or give the unit to someone else.
Speaker 10:
About, A.
Jonathan Mosen:
And there's various information in the about dialogue. So that is a very brief tour of the settings. Let's conclude with some final thoughts. Orbit Speak continues to receive substantial software enhancements and bug fixes. We've been made aware of concerns about voice recordings becoming corrupted in the past and it looks like this may have been one of the areas where there has been improvement over time.
We have not experienced this in our current round of testing. It's important that Orbit Research keeps adding to the product because as it stands right now, that's the only way that it gets new features. The platform doesn't contain any tools for anyone other than Orbit Research to produce software for the device.
In other words, there is no application programming interface. There is no software development kit at this point. And while there have been new features added, Orbit Speak cannot at this stage replace a computer. Of particular note is that it has no email client, it has no web browser and it has no way to communicate at this time with any of the AI models that are now playing such a big role in many of our lives.
At the moment there is no remote mode in Orbit Speak like there is in some of the other Orbit products, which would allow the Orbit Speak to also serve as an Orbit Writer. Many people like the Orbit Writer, which is a small Braille keyboard because it follows a Perkins style layout, as opposed to aligning the keys like a Braille cell is aligned and Orbit Research tells me that they are in testing right now with the ability to make the Orbit Speak also serve as an Orbit Writer so that you will be able to Braille into the device and it will serve as a keyboard for your iPhone or your PC.
It is a solid device for taking notes and consuming some content, although the lack of NLS support will be considered by many a significant impediment in the US market. Some have expressed concerns about the noise of the keyboard. It could be that this is something that Orbit Research has addressed, or it may be simply that these things are highly subjective. We didn't find our unit unduly noisy to type on, and the travel and spacing of the keys is excellent.
Having to use your thumbs for dots seven and eight may take some getting used to, but you can get used to it if you're using it every day. And if you are going to use the Orbit Speak regularly, you may like to purchase the Turtleback leather carrying case for it. It protects the unit while also allowing you to use it in the case while you are wearing it.
If you'd like to know more about the Orbit Speak, you can go to orbitresearch.com. That's all joined together, orbitresearch.com, And if you check their products pages, you will find plenty of information about the Orbit Speak. Not only is the tutorial well produced, but the user guide is also very well written and informative.
That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip or just write it down and send it to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Masterdon, [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Masterdon.
To subscribe to an announcements only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org or phone us (410) 659-9314. That's (410) 659-9314 and be sure to check out the Nation's Blind podcast right from where you heard this podcast.