ATU734 – BrailleDoodle with Daniel Lubiner – Part 2

Hi, this is Daniel Lubiner. I am the executive director and founder of the Touchpad Pro Foundation, and I invented the Braille Doodle 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 734 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on June 20th, 2025.

On today’s show, we have the exciting conclusion of our interview with Daniel Lubiner and Dawn Campbell talking about the Braille Doodle and the Touchpad Pro Foundation. If you missed the first part of the interview, be sure to go back and listen to episode 733, which came out last week to learn even more. Today, we’re also joined by our friends from Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning. Also, don’t forget, we’re always looking for your input, so please, if you’ve got a question, a comment, or someone we should have on the show, please drop us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We always love hearing from you and some of our best guests and suggestions come straight from you. For folks looking for a transcript of today’s show, that is available over at eastersealstech.com. Our transcripts are generously sponsored by INTRAC. You can learn more about INTRAC and their amazing programs at indianarelay.com. Folks, as always, we thank you so much for listening today. Now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Maybe you’re looking for some new podcast to listen to. Well make sure to check out our sister podcast, ATFAQ or Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions. On Assistive Technology Frequently Asked questions, Brian Norton leads our panel of experts as we try to answer your assistive technology questions. This show does rely on you, so we’re always looking for new questions, comments, or even your answers on Assistive Technology Questions. So remember, if you’re looking for more Assistive Technology podcasts to check out, you can check out our sister show ATFAQ wherever you get your podcasts, including Spotify and Amazon Music.

Listeners, we are super excited to announce that we have another INDATA full-day training coming up on Thursday, June 26, we’ll 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 26, 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 Bridging Apps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with Bridging Apps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Social Success. [inaudible 00:04:46] Social Success is a social skills training tool to help teens and young adults on the autism spectrum prepare for social independence. This app provides interactive tutorials on five topics that are relevant to daily living at school, with friends, important skills, using technology, and at work. Each of these topics explores key subtopics such as asking for help, appropriate text messaging, safety at home, et cetera. Social Success walks users through each subtopic of the five program steps, an introduction, steps or instructions, self-talk, a movie, and problem solving.

This systematic exploration of each topic is easy to follow and predictable, which provides the structure necessary for understanding. Text instructions include a read aloud section, which allows those with reading Difficulties to hear the words and follow along as the text is highlighted on the screen. The app provides valuable information on day-to-day social skills for those with social cognitive deficits. Important topics such as talking to strangers, how to order food, paying a bill, et cetera, are explored through the app’s five-step process, allowing users to walk through and interactively explore each skill. Social Success is currently available for iOS devices for a one-time fee of $59.99. If you’d like to trial the app, Social Success Lite is available with three stories and is free to download for more information on this app and others like it, visit bridgingapps.org

Listeners right now. We’re going to jump right back into our interview with Daniel Lubiner and Dawn Campbell. Now, Daniel is the founder and executive director of the Touchpad Pro Foundation and Dawn Campbell is the president of the board of Directors for the Touchpad Pro Foundation, and we’ve been talking about the Braille Doodle. If you happen to miss the first part of this interview, please go back to episode 733 from last week and check that out. But let’s go ahead and get right back into the interview with Daniel Lubiner and Dawn Campbell talking about the Braille Doodle.

I wanted to ask, just because I can’t remember if you or Dawn had brought this up just about how in the process of the Braille Doodle, and again, I think last time we had you on was a few years ago, that you really listened to folks. Maybe what were some of the changes that were made from maybe your very early concept to the Braille Doodle as it exists today that were shaped by that user feedback?

That’s a great question. Great question. And some of the things that I think it used to be, it had a lot more holes actually where I wanted it to go for as big as possible. A lot of people were saying, that’s too heavy. It’s like it weighs too much. And it’s still got some heft to it, but it’s not as heavy because the more ball bearings that you have, the heavier it’s going to be. So we cut down a little bit. I also had three rows of 19 Braille cells and I cut that down to two, but that allowed me to put more examples. Like somebody said, “Well, why don’t you have the alphabet on there in standard size Braille?” So I had the alphabet put in standard size Braille, and then we had a sentence put in standard size Braille so you could experience a full sentence like, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” And that’s a special sentence, so you could find every letter in there.

Two more pieces of feedback that came from, if you hear this, it’s pretty loud. I mean, it’s not loud. It’s all muted. Because in the center is rubber. Right? Like wetsuit type material, and that allows it to, because it would be like a really loud thing if it was just all metal and plastic. I wish I had the old one here, but if you shake the old one, oh my god, it’s so loud. So a teacher said something like, “If you have six of these in a classroom, this could be crazy.” And then another thing I came up with is the XY axis is built in. So there’s a bunch of dots, lines of dots that you could feel that are permanent that go along the center from horizontally, vertically, and that way you could use it as an XY axis. And a lot of people are very excited about that because there’s nothing out there that could do that where you’re actually plotting points like negative three, positive four, and you could do that yourself instead of being handed a piece of paper.

But then I had a high school kid come up to me once and said, “Oh, you got this wrong.” And I’m like, “What do you mean I have it wrong?” “Well, you can’t have the line in between the dots. They have to be on the dots.” I’m like, “Why is it, why not?” And she said, “Well, how are you going to do zero negative three?” I’m like, “Oh, because it has to be on the line.” So it can’t be under the line or over the line because then it won’t make sense as zero negative three or zero positive three or positive seven zero. So in order to do those dots, you can’t have the line … So it’s been a really interesting adventure where the feedback gets really cool. And that’s what really helped me a lot too from the beginning.

Even when you go on the web page, there’s a section for directions where you go through the directions and instructional videos. We couldn’t just wrap this up into two minutes of instructions or a manual that comes with it. So it’s a whole bunch of videos. But I discuss these videos with my team.

Dawn is cited, I’m cited. But we have Matthew, who’s our chief experience officer, and he’s been with us for a couple years now and he is able to tell me, like he’s a teacher too, he teaches adults technology in Arizona. So he was able to tell me, “Well, listen, this is how you think about it. This is how you experience it.” If somebody’s taking it out of the box, I didn’t think about this when I was doing the direction, he’s like, “Well, you have to put it in front of you and realize that it’s like it’s not upside down or it’s not sideways.” So you have to talk about which side the stylus is on, which side the top is on, so to orient it in front of you, just all these little things that you wouldn’t guess right off the bat. So that was cool.

For sure, for sure.

Josh, one of the things, it’s Dawn, I’ll jump in here for a minute too. One of the areas where we get tremendous feedback constantly, and again, every time in the last month since I’ve been working with Touchpad Pro Foundation and the number of demos that we get to do to students and to teachers, and again to people that are interested in the doodle, we get so much feedback about the stencils. And I don’t know if Daniel had a chance to touch on this yet.

Nope, not yet.

So two years ago, I don’t think those stencils were in your head, were they, Daniel? Because as when you get the box now, the Braille Doodle, you will also get three stencils. And so, the Braille Doodle evolved to be able to slide a stencil, which is about the size of a piece of printer paper, eight and a half by 11. You slide it into the one side of the blank side of the doodle, and then you’ve got other types of things that you can be working on. And so Daniel, why don’t you just touch quickly on the stencils and again where we could be going with that over the next couple of years.

Sure, sure. Yeah, that was another thing that came up. Originally, the idea was to have covers that we could slide on sleeves that it would fit into. But the whole idea of having these stencils and then having these notches on the side that the stencils could slide into, it just opens up another incredible amount of possibilities. Well, one stencil that comes with it is just braille cells, so it divides it up into dozens and dozens of Braille cells. So you have the back now where you could write full words and sentences. I’ve heard about people leaving each other love notes and stuff like that. Just leave it on the table. It’s cute. But just to practice or take down some notes too.

Another one is the math stencil. So the math stencil came from an old invention that used to, with the tiny little cubes that you would turn around to make all types of multiplication, division problems and stuff like that, you would line up these cubes. And so, what the math stencil does is divide up the whole surface into two by two dots, so squares, and that allows you to write any number because the numbers that are top four dots, so you could write any number into the squares and that allows you to do multiplication, division, that long division, all that fun stuff that we hated when we were kids. You know?

The other one that comes with it is my favorite. This was actually the first thing that came along was doing art. How can we get the blind to low vision to just be able to do art right out of the box? So this stencil has a house and a large tree and a smaller tree. It also has the capital H on there, because it’s important to learn the way letters actually feel, the way print letters feel as well. But as I was saying, when you have the trees and stuff like that, you can learn about all different types of concepts that you wouldn’t normally. That’s difficult to teach. Sort of like perspective. Is this small tree smaller than this big tree, or is it small tree more in the distance, and that’s why it appears smaller because of perspective? When you have mountains in the distance, they don’t really seem like mountains. That type of thing that’s difficult to explain.

One thing that also in the future, we could come up with all different types of stencils, like stencils for graphs, stencils for animals, stencils for geometry. And so we’re going to have, they’re already asking us where are these stencil sets and where are we going to have more things and more like the dogs, but we’re going to be developing those in the future. So we’re very excited about that as well.

Nice. That’s absolutely awesome. Well, we’ve got a little bit of time here left. Daniel, or maybe even Dawn, can you tell me a story, and you’ve told me a few, but maybe of someone’s experience with the Braille Doodle that surprised you or just really sticks with you through all this time kind of working with it?

I have a very quick story I can share. I was at the Canadian National Blind Hockey Championships, which happened in Toronto a few weeks ago. And Daniel had donated some Braille Doodles to the participants. Now we had 190 athletes from across the provinces, all with less than 10% vision who participated. So obviously having passed around some Braille Doodles, there was definitely lots of intrigue and interest, also by coaches who were thinking about how they could use the blank side of the Braille Doodle to do hockey plays. But I also met a mother who has a 16-year-old son. Now, her son played. I gave him the doodle to have hands-on experience with, and now he had learned braille when he was three. But again, some of the comments that he made while he was running his hands over top of the doodle was just like, “Where was this when I was little? I wish I so much had this when I was learning braille when I was little.”

And on the side that doesn’t have the braille literacy, I’ve been in touch a few times with his mother since, and she says he is just constantly using it. She’s starting to use it too because as much as he has known braille his whole life, mom didn’t know it, but mom likes to now leave Braille messages for him in the mornings when she gets up and he comes and feels, and there might be a morning note, which is something that hasn’t been done before. So anyway, it just really, really, really stuck out that moment when someone who’s already an experienced braille user just couldn’t wait to share it with those who are learning.

That was very well said, Dawn. And it sort of touches on some of the experiences I had where at the conventions and stuff, we had blind parents and sighted children who were coming up and the children and the parents were able to work together and the children who would draw things for their parents and have their parents feel it and say, “Look, this is a car I drew and here are the wheels and here’s the roof.” And there was actually someone who said this on a podcast, but it was just really touching when he said, “I had lost my vision over time. And my daughter comes up to me and says, ‘can we draw it together?’ And I don’t know what to say really, and it will just be so nice when I get this and we’re able to draw together and do things together using this device.” So that’s one thing.

And the other thing, like Dawn touched on, little kids going, “Oh, I can’t wait to show my brother. I could teach my brother Braille.” Or, “I could teach my classmates Braille.” And that’s really such a different thing that’s coming out of this is that bridge, that connection. So you think about that one kid in a classroom who’s blind and all the other kids are sighted. That was one thing we haven’t touched on is we wanted to make this as inexpensive as possible too. It kind of got stuck at about $150 US, but that’s still, for something like this, you could buy 10 of them for your classroom so that kid doesn’t feel so alone anymore. Everybody’s learning a little bit of Braille and we’re trying to get them out there where somebody can purchase it for a whole bunch of people instead of just one for a teacher or one for this. And where you could do tactile drawings under $15,000. It’s amazing.

Yeah, it is. It is. It’s super cool. It just opens up so many more doors that kind of way. Well, Daniel, if our listeners want to find out more about the Braille Doodle and maybe even work on getting one for themselves, their friends, their schools, whatever, what’s a way for them to do that?

Yeah, you could just go to touchpadprofoundation.org. So touchpadprofoundation.org, and from there you just hit ‘buy one in the USA’. But that’s the other thing that’s really been wonderful, Josh, is this is going around the world now. I have people from the Middle East who want to sell it. Sight & Sound in UK are already selling it. Australia’s already selling it. In Canada, we have somebody, Canadian Assistive Technology, who are selling it now. And it’s just very exciting the way it’s just jumping around to different parts of the world.

No, that’s great. We love, love, love to see how far it’s made. Like I said, last time we had you on, and granted that’s been quite some time ago, but just to see it, I don’t want to say in its infancy, you’d done a lot of work on it and everything, but it wasn’t really readily available. And I’m so glad that not just is this accommodation out there to help with Braille, to help with, as you said, with art, with math, with so many different things. But it’s also affordable, which is something you don’t always, always see. So Daniel, we’re so happy that it’s out there, that it’s available for folks. And I do have to recommend listeners that you do go out there and check it out. Go to the touchpadfoundation.org and check it out. And you-

Touchpad Pro.

Touchpad Pro Foundation, man. See, and that’s why you keep me honest and I appreciate that. I’m sitting here reading it right off my screen and still got it wrong. But anyway, touchpadprofoundation.org as I was corrected there. So Daniel, Dawn, thank you so much both of you for coming on the show, for telling us about the Braille Doodle for telling us about just the importance of learning Braille and really just enjoyed the conversation and so happy that this is out there and available to folks as an accommodation. Thanks again.

Thank you, Josh.

Thank you.

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 at 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 Nicole 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.