[BlindRUG] R and multi-line braille displays

[Robin Williams]

Hi Marcus,

I don’t have direct experience of this, although I am also very interested. I did however try out the Graphiti Plus display at the Sight Village exhibition in London last year, and was impressed. I prepared some images in R, saved them to my phone, and was able to connect my phone to the display and look at the output. The Graphiti has different options for filtering the output which were fun to experiment with – for example, I remember one filter being particularly good at showing a histogram. The advantage as I see it of the Graphiti over the Monarch is that it has the option to display dots at different heights, although on the flip side I believe the Monarch has a higher resolution. I haven’t seen the Dot Pad, although I’d like to. I did see that Freedom Scientific have now released multiline Braille support for the Monarch and Dot Pad, but not yet for the graphiti, which is something else to consider.

I’ve been putting off applying for funding to get one of these devices, as it seems like quite a fast moving space and I don’t want to end up with something that becomes massively outdated in the first year. The question for me, though, is how long to wait?

In case you aren’t aware, there is an NFB email list, Tactile-Talk, which has other interested people. It’s been very low traffic, but I’ve found what there has been to be interesting. You might get some useful feedback there as well.

Please keep us updated if you take this further.

All the best,
Robin


From: BlindRUG <blindrug-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Marcus Low via BlindRUG
Sent: 17 September 2025 08:44
To: blindrug at nfbnet.org
Cc: Marcus Low <low.marcus at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindRUG] R and multi-line braille displays

Hi All

Does anyone have experience using R with some of the new multiline braille displays like the Dot Pad X? It would be fantastic if one of these devices could be used to routinely display graphical output from R. It is quite expensive though, so one would want to be sure it works before trying to get hold of a device. I'd be very keen to hear about people's experiences. The page for the Dot Pad X is here https://www.dotincorp.com/en/product/dotpadx

Thanks
Marcus

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