Braille 'n Speak

The Braille 'n Speak was the device that made the notetaker an industry — a videocassette-sized box with seven keys and a voice, launched at the National Federation of the Blind's 1987 convention by a founder who had hand-built ten units on a $10,000 personal stake and sold nine of them on the spot. The National Federation of the Blind's own timeline calls it "the first portable notetaking device with a Braille keyboard" — a decade before the PalmPilot, blind professionals already had the personal organizer.^[1]

Roots: Frankfort and the Portabraille

Deane Blazie — an electrical engineer with an advanced degree in computer science — founded Blazie Engineering in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1986, returning to developing products for the blind after consulting work. The product came through friendships and a failed predecessor: his lifelong friend Tim Cranmer, plus Fred Gissoni and Judy Dixon, all had a hand in the Braille 'n Speak coming about — Blazie remembered Dixon's prophecy: "He who makes the best notetaker will rule the blindness industry."^[2]

Gissoni, then at the Kentucky Department for the Blind, had already built the Portabraille — a braille display interfaced to a small computer and memory chips. It was probably the first notetaker, though never commercially available, and it had one fatal flaw: when you turned it off, all the memory went away. Gissoni pulled it apart one day to show Blazie — keyboard and microprocessor living on a single board — and the idea transferred. Blazie's job was to make it persistent, reliable, and sellable.^[3]

The Phoenix convention

Blazie invested $10,000 of his own money, built ten units by hand, and carried them to the NFB National Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, June 27 – July 4, 1987 — exhibiting at both the NFB and American Council of the Blind conventions that July. He sold nine on the spot — the empty inventory that launched an industry.^[4]

What it replaced

To feel the device's impact, hold the alternative: writing braille meant a slate and stylus — slow, punched in mirror-reversed dots — or a Perkins Brailler, a machine the size of a small typewriter. Notes lived on paper; there was no editing, no searching, no filing. The Braille 'n Speak put a persistent digital office in a two-pound box — write in chorded braille, hear it back, file it away, recall it in seconds.^[5]

The machine

The classic Braille 'n Speak weighed two pounds, was roughly the size of a videocassette, and cost $895 — deliberately ordinary in every dimension except function. Its whole interface was seven keys: the six dots of braille plus a space bar — the chorded writing system blind users already knew — plus speech output so anything could be spoken aloud. In that footprint it carried a working office: up to 30 files of notes, a calendar, a phone directory, clock and date, a calculator, and a stopwatch.^[6]

What made it transformative was the match between medium and user: six-key chorded braille input is faster and more compact than QWERTY for a practiced braille writer, and speech output replaces the screen entirely. It also quietly taught braille — Zaborowski's account describes learning and keeping the code because the device made writing it useful daily.^[7]

The family and the industry

The classic grew siblings fast: the Braille Lite and Braille Lite 40 (adding refreshable braille displays — silent, tactile output beside the speech), and the QWERTY-keyed Type 'n Speak and Type Lite for users who never learned six-key input. Memory and processors scaled generation over generation, and the format Blazie invented — the notetaker as pocket office — became the blindness industry's defining product category; modern braille notetakers descend through this line. By the turn of the century Blazie Engineering ran roughly $15 million in annual gross receipts, 70 employees, and an estimated 70,000 notetakers in blind consumers' hands — so ubiquitous that blindness gatherings were visibly full of them.^[3]

Freedom Scientific

On 11 April 2000 Blazie Engineering merged with Henter-Joyce — Ted Henter's St. Petersburg software house and maker of JAWS, the world's best-selling Windows screen reader — and Arkenstone, Jim Fruchterman's nonprofit software company, forming Freedom Scientific. The merger joined the two halves of assistive technology: Blazie's braille hardware and Henter-Joyce's speech software under one company. Henter had founded his firm in 1987 after losing his sight in a car accident and teaching himself to program; at the merger Henter-Joyce employed 71 people, 31 of them blind or visually impaired.^[8]

The Linux connection

The little Kentucky notetaker survives in a surprising place: the Linux kernel. Speakup — the kernel-resident screen reader — ships a bns synthesizer driver (drivers/accessibility/speakup/speakup_bns.c) that talks through a Braille 'n Speak connected as an external speech synthesizer. A 1987 basement-built organizer is a supported Linux speech device in the current kernel — the tech link that ties this page to its neighbors.^[9]

References

• AFB AccessWorld — "Deane Blazie: Forging a New Path for Literacy" + "A Look Back: Two Historical Interviews" (oral history: Portabraille, $10k/$895, company growth)
• NFB Braille Technology Timeline (Future Reflections) — July 1987 launch, nine sold
• NFB Braille Monitor — October–November 1987 convention record; April 2000 merger press release
• NFB Future Reflections — Betsy Zaborowski, "The Braille 'n Speak"
• Linux kernel drivers/accessibility/speakup/speakup_bns.c

See also

• Speakup — the kernel screen reader that still drives it
• Kurzweil Reading Machine — the earlier print-to-speech machine
• BRLTTY — the refreshable-braille daemon the family inspired
• Braille · Louis Braille · Abraham Nemeth · Nemeth Braille Code
• Freedom Scientific · Deane Blazie · JAWS
• Eyes-Free Linux — the handbook chapter this hardware lineage feeds
• The Library — braille codes and translation on the main site