ATU733 – BrailleDoodle with Daniel Lubiner – Part 1

Hi, this is Daniel Lubiner. I am the executive director and founder of The TouchPad Pro Foundation, and I invented the BrailleDoodle, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 733 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on June 13th, 2025. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome back Daniel Lubiner and welcome Dawn Campbell. They are from The TouchPad Pro Foundation and are here to tell us all about the BrailleDoodle. Now, we had Daniel back on the show, oh, on show 626 back in May of 2023, but there’s been some major updates to the BrailleDoodle and we can’t wait to learn all about them. We are also joined once again by BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

Please don’t forget, listeners, we are always looking for new guests. If you happen to know of a guest or something that you’d like to learn something more about someone we should reach out to have on the show, please don’t have hesitate to reach out. You can send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Also, don’t forget you can check out all of our amazing programs at the INDATA Project as well as this podcast, our tech tips, and many other great things over at eastersealstech.com. But for now, listeners, let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Listeners, we are super excited to announce that we have another INDATA full day training coming up on Thursday, June 26th. We will be hosting assistive technology for the K-12 environment. This training will be 100% free, 100% online via Zoom. You can go to our website at eastersealstech.com and register for the training there. I will also put a link down in the show notes.

This training will feature members of our ATLAS staff going over some different assistive technologies that can help individuals with disabilities in basically the K-12 environment with all kinds of different learning and access needs. We’ll also have some special guests joining us talking about universal design for learning, tools for individuals with certain disabilities, as well as how to and where to include assistive technology in the IEP process. For a full agenda as well as to register for the training, visit us at eastersealstech.com, go to full-day trainings, and you can find the link right there. I will also put a link to that page down in the show notes so that you can easily register for our upcoming INDATA free training on Thursday, June 26th, 2025. Again, this training will be over assistive technology for the K-12 environment, it is 100% free and 100% online via Zoom. We hope to see you there. Next up on the show, listeners, please join me in welcoming back, BridgingApps, with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called StepByStep Sequencing Freemium. StepByStep is an app designed to evaluate and facilitate sequencing skills. Using the app is simple. Select the category, adult or kids, and then select the sequence. Written directions instruct the user to arrange the sequences in order from left to right. Once finished, the user touches the continue button to see how many steps were completed correctly. The user then has the choice to try again or to see the results. The free sequences in the adult category are getting dressed, eight steps, and flower planting, six steps.

The free sequences in the kids category are teeth brushing, four steps, and pumpkin carving, six steps. Sequences range from 3 to 10 steps and are appropriate for all users of all ages and skill levels. App can be used with a variety of diagnoses such as dementia, stroke, traumatic brain injury, and developmental delay. It is a very versatile app that is helpful to assist in teaching sequencing. It can be used for both adults and children and have a variety of clearly illustrated sequences with a varying number of steps. StepByStep is currently available for iOS devices and is free to download with in-app purchases to access additional sequences. For more information on this app and others like it, visit Bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, Daniel Lubiner was on this program on episode 626 a little over two years ago. At that time, the BrailleDoodle was still in the Kickstarter phase, if I remember correctly. Well, Daniel is back today, and not only are we all about two years older, but some other things have changed as well. We’re also joined by Dawn Campbell, the president of the board of directors for The TouchPad Pro Foundation, and we cannot wait to get an update on the BrailleDoodle and learn even more. Daniel, Dawn, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. [inaudible 00:05:49] great to be here.

Daniel, thank you so much for coming back on this show, for giving us updates, telling us all about the BrailleDoodle. Before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. My name’s Daniel Lubiner and I am the executive director and founder of… Well, I already said that. Of Touchpad Pro Foundation. But here I am again and it’s great to be back. Just to tell you a little bit about where this all came from, I’ll give you the quick synopsis. So I was a teacher for over 20 years, and I love teaching reading, I teach reading to all types of different kids, kids with autism or kids with learning disabilities and all types of different special ed.

But then in the last five, six years of my teaching, I was teaching the blind and low vision and I was teaching them art, and I just loved that. That was just a great, great experience. I was nervous at first. I was like, “What am I going to do? I’ve never been around blind people. I’ve never been around blind kids,” but very quickly, it just became the best job I ever had. And I really enjoyed it, figuring out different things that we could do, different ways we could explore the world in a tactile way in the world of art and how we could turn stories into art that could be felt. Then the pandemic hit and everybody went home and it was just a very frustrating time for everybody. But especially for kids who were blind and low vision, the school was their outlet. That’s where they come and they socialize and see their friends and hang out.

So here they are stuck at home and a lot of cases around where I was, they’re in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, they don’t have a lot of money to go out and buy things. So I was getting on the computer with them and just doing a little bit of songs or poetry and things like that. So it was just very frustrating. So I had this toy from Amazon. It was like what the BrailleDoodle is now, but it was smaller. And if you touched it, the balls would fall down. So I decided it was a drawing board… Like what we talk about, the BrailleDoodle is like an Et A Sketch for the blind. So I started working on this BrailleDoodle, and little did I know that it would be this insane adventure, but wonderful adventure where I would also be able to teach reading and writing because then I found out kids are not really learning braille on an international level. I mean, Dawn could tell you a little bit about that.

Dawn, can you tell us a little bit more about that and just a little bit about maybe braille or how that’s the view on it’s changing in the world?

Absolutely. So just to give you a little bit of background about myself, I was also an educator for many years, although I haven’t been teaching in the classroom in about 10 years. I did teach in the special education system for many years. And really, when it comes to braille literacy rates… Now you have to keep in mind, I live in Canada. And although we are a smaller population, our braille literacy rates are really no different than other countries around the world, and that is, again, it’s just incredibly low what’s happening right now. Using just United States statistics, in the blind community there is a 10% literacy rate. Now, why? Why is it that people who are blind and low vision aren’t even learning braille to what we would assume people should be learning it?

Now, there’s a lot of devices out there that are very, very expensive, but I know, since my introduction to the BrailleDoodle, that it has come about through a lot of feedback, and again, a lot of feedback from educators and parents that feel like because nothing like this device has existed before, it’s been a challenge to teach braille in the past. And so when you think about, again, more statistics, there are only 32% of people who are blind and low vision graduate high school, and only 16% of people from college and one in three people are living in poverty. So, again, learning literacy, it’s a human right and it’s something that we all should be doing regardless of whether we can see or not. And yet, somehow, literacy rates around the world are incredibly low. And, I mean, that’s just what the literacy rates are in the United States. If you take a look at countries like India, we’ve got literacy rates of less than 1%. So that’s just to give you a broader sense of the picture.

Yeah, that makes such a huge difference. And I know the students I’ve worked with who know braille… And I’m not a braille teacher or a teacher in any way, shape or form. I have the greatest respect for all who can. But, yes, just grasping concepts and everything is so much quicker than just maybe the thought that, “Well, you can just listen to it,” or, “Well, just hearing it’ll give you enough.” So you’re so right. It’s amazing how little folks are taught. And Dawn, not to dwell on it, but do you think that the lower literacy rates are not enough teachers of braille and not enough methods? What do you think all lends itself to that?

Well, I mean, it begs to ask the question because, I mean, again, each of our school systems are different. And for example, in Canada, it’s been the last 20 to 25 years where we have very, very few schools for the blind, very, very few programs within our K-12 system that are segregated. And, I mean, there’s obviously logic why inclusion is very important, but I think you’re onto something there from an educator perspective. If you have one student, again, in an inclusive school that’s blind, it begs to wonder how much time does that student actually get with a braille literacy coach? Because I was an educational assistant 20 years ago too, and certainly this was not something you would learn as an educational assistant in terms of how to teach braille. So, I mean, I think it’s a combination of…

Yeah. I think you’re hitting upon it, Dawn. Yeah, you’re hitting upon it, and Josh was hitting upon it too. There aren’t enough teachers out there and there aren’t enough materials out there to teach braille, and it’s a huge teacher shortage of just people who want to teach, or TVIs, teachers of visually impaired or blind students. But then when you get into rural communities, there’s one teacher who would have to travel around and maybe a kid gets a half hour a week of individualized instruction. Or another thing that I saw when I was a teacher where a lot of students who have some vision who fall somewhere on the spectrum is they either stop learning braille or stop being taught braille because they could see something. And I think that’s why the statistic is so big, because when you’re looking at all of the blind and low vision community together, you have to keep in mind anybody who could benefit from it, anybody who would read faster or read with more comprehension if they had the ability to read braille.

And we know if you’re learning Braille when you’re a kid, you’re learning how to read and write when you’re a child, it’s helping connect so many synapses and things that wouldn’t get connected otherwise. So it’s really important. So that became part of our mission is how can somebody take this out of the box and start learning braille right off the bat in a no pressure, fun way, not just like, “Okay, we have to learn how to read everything.” And then it became a lot more about adults. At first, it was all about children. I was thinking all the early learners and the four-year-olds, five-year-olds, seven-year-olds who are just starting out, but 50% of our customers have been adults. And I think it’s also because the art side, they love the art side, but they also… The ability to just learn a few letters, a couple letters at a time and not have any pressure, maybe they could learn the numbers, how to get on an elevator and get themselves around.

Daniel, you brought up a great point there just talking about older learners, and I won’t dwell on braille and those things, but I’ve worked with a lot of folks in the past who maybe lost their sight later. Maybe they had something progressive, and like you said, were maybe low vision or even just everything came on later. So I love that there’s an option to be able to help them because it’s… Well, I mean, let’s not lie, it’s a lot harder to learn anything as we get older. I know, at least personally, and I’m sure for anybody. So having a tool where you can learn at your own pace. But we’ve talked about all these amazing reasons and everything else, but let’s dig in a little bit more to the BrailleDoodle. So we talked a little bit about braille and about learning it. So we’ll talk about both sides of the BrailleDoodle, but let’s start with the braille side. How does it help with learning braille?

Right. So for those who don’t know much about the BrailleDoodle, I’m going to just describe it really quick for you. It’s a tablet about the size of a laptop and it’s about an inch thick. And it’s two-sided. There’s the one side for braille instruction that we’ll talk about, and then one side that’s filled with hundreds and hundreds of holes that you could draw with and you can make all kinds of shapes and it just opens up a different type of myriad of different things that you could do with it. So I like to do this… And even though it’s audio here. This is all the [inaudible 00:18:41] that are inside. There’s tiny, tiny ball bearings that are inside the hundreds of holes.

And when you drag this magnetic stylus, so it’s a pen with a magnet, a rounded magnet on the end, when you touch the surface, the little [inaudible 00:19:00] come up and they stay up just right, meaning that you could touch them over and over and over again and they won’t fall down until you’re ready and you could just push them back down. You just use a little extra force and they pop right back down. So I thought that was going to be easy to accomplish, but when I took that to engineers and they were like, “I don’t know how we’re going to do that. Yeah, I see what you want to do, but… So it took $120,000 by the time we were done with everything. And so how was I going to get the money? How was I… So I started the nonprofit and we raised a lot of money, but it was over a year and a half [inaudible 00:20:06].

But the biggest thing was the Kickstarter, like you mentioned, when I was here last time, was to get everybody on our side and become part of the BrailleDoodle team, [inaudible 00:20:20] the BrailleDoodle family. And now we’re just a whole big family, 800 strong around the world who have BrailleDoodles in their hands and they’re really liking them. So getting back to the braille side, the braille side is set up like a grid and it’s gridded out using tactile lines like these ridges. So you could feel the larger ridge or a smaller ridge, and it’s the larger ridges divided up into two jumbo braille cells and it teaches you as you go along. So as a teacher, I was setting it up so it could teach you, it models for you, so you could feel the six dots of a braille cell, but only the one dot works. So in the first one, the only dot works that will make that letter. So in the first one, dot number one, which is A, pops up, but you can’t pick up two, three, four, five or six.

And then in the braille cell next to it, all the dots work. So you have to copy it, but you can mess up. So you have to make it match. Because you learn by doing, that’s a big thing about the BrailleDoodle and all my teaching, you have to learn by actually doing it. You can’t just be shown it, you have to do it yourself. So you make a B, and then you copy the B. You make the C, and then you copy the C. But I can mess up and I say, “Oh, that C doesn’t match, so let me make it match,” so now it matches. And the other important thing is I saw a lot… Because as I was developing this, I kept talking to people, looking at different products and thinking about what could make these products better, and one thing that stood out a lot was that there was no place to go from learning letters to words and sentences.

So once you learn the [inaudible 00:22:46] you have to make cat, you have to make mat, you have to make fat, you just have to see fat cat sat on mat, you go on like that. And you also have to have real braille. I wanted to put real braille [inaudible 00:23:04]. What I mean by that is the standard size braille, you have to be able to have that all over the place so you could really feel like, okay, you’re making jumbo braille, but this is what it feels like when you are actually feeling standard size braille. So you’re constantly having that switch of, “Okay, here’s the jumbo braille, here’s standard. Here’s jumbo, here’s standard.” So you’re always having that switch of understanding the [inaudible 00:23:35].

Nice, nice. And then, yeah, I love that, like you said, that it gives you the chance to practice, the chance to actually mess up, and then the actual cells to be able to write words and practice those letters and really put them together. Because as we all learn literacy, it starts with the ABCs, but then after that, you start doing the sound, start putting it all together. And if you’ve got a place to practice the letters, that’s wonderful, but having the place to be able to put them all together and really get your words together, I’m sure helps [inaudible 00:24:03] which is the literacy, being able to write, being able to read, and being able to get all that information. And then [inaudible 00:24:07] we touched on it a little bit, tell us about the other side of the BrailleDoodle.

So the other side has 1,333 holes that each one has that little ball in it. So if I just drag the stylus around in a big circle, you’re not going to get a perfect circle, but you get the idea of what the circle feels like. You could do shapes, you can make a smiling face. A lot of people came up during the conferences, during CSUN, during NFB, and they’re just sitting there and they don’t want to put it down. They just want to keep going and going and going. It’s wonderful to see. And we just had… Dawn, who was that person who did the article in Canada?

Donna Jodhan.

Yeah, Donna Jodhan. So if you Google BrailleDoodle with Donna Jodhan, she just did a wonderful article where she emphasized how much she was enjoying the fact that she could create, that she could do art right away, just picking up this thing and just start sketching and enjoying what she’s doing right off the bat. She doesn’t have to get this piece or this special stylus or these special pieces of paper or… She just picks this up and she could start creating. And how important that is for everybody to have that ability to do that.

Listeners, unfortunately, that is all the time we have for this week’s show. So be sure to join us next week on episode 734, coming out on June 20th, 2025 where we will have the rest of our interview about the BrailleDoodle. See you next week. Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @INDATAproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.