Soaring to Success: Student Strengthens Braille and Tactile Literacy Skills on the Monarch

A new piece of access technology can be both educational and fun. For rising fourth grader Gavin Leblond, that device is the APH Monarch.

Gavin’s father, Seth, is the Assistive Technology Coordinator at the Foundation for Blind Children in Phoenix, Arizona. In January 2024, Seth completed the Monarch Masters Program teacher training at the ATIA conference and brought the device home for his son to see. As a braille reader who aspires to work in the technology field, Gavin was ecstatic to meet the Monarch, a 10-line by 32-cell refreshable display that renders braille and tactile graphics on the same surface.

Gavin was pleased to discover that the Monarch had similar functions to his BrailleNote Touch from HumanWare and found the device simple to use.

“I just put the Monarch in front of him, and he figured it out,” said Seth. “The fact that it will be easy for students to learn who have already been in this sort of ecosystem of products is a big selling point.”

Like his dad, Gavin’s favorite Monarch app was the tactile viewer, which grants users access to thousands of graphics from APH’s Tactile Graphic Image Library (TGIL). Seth and Gavin looked at a graphic of the layers of the atmosphere and a tactile U.S. map.

“Dad showed me point and click and how it can zoom in and into specific parts by double tapping the action button and putting your finger there,” said Gavin. Utilizing this technique, he located Arizona on the map. Exploring the images in the TGIL gave Gavin an idea. He invented a game called ‘Guess the Graphic,’ where he opened a tactile graphic and had his dad identify it by touch. In the first round, Gavin pulled up a picture of the Churchill Downs racetrack and asked his dad what it was, but Seth couldn’t be fooled. He named the picture immediately.

The games continued as Seth and Gavin used the braille editor on the Monarch to play ‘Mystery,’ where they wrote mystery sentences to each other and passed the display back and forth as they responded to the other’s words. In this activity, no talking was allowed as their conversation is meant to take place fully in braille. By playing these games, Gavin strengthened his tactile and braille literacy skills, which are key to academic success.

Gavin has not had the chance to use the Monarch in school, but he and Seth are enthusiastic about its potential to assist in the classroom. When Gavin started at his current school, he didn’t have any services for an entire trimester, and even after he started receiving them, sometimes, his classroom materials were not available in braille.

“One time, I couldn’t even do the test because there wasn’t braille,” said Gavin. The Monarch will solve this problem as teachers can put materials onto a flash drive for students to open on the display. This revolutionary resource will further level the playing field as students who are blind and low vision will have instantaneous access to the same tactile images as their sighted peers through the tactile viewer. Students like Gavin will no longer have to use the Perkins Brailler to solve spatial math problems as they can now complete them in the Word processor on the Monarch. The built-in talking graphing calculator will also help Gavin as he learns to graph.

With the Monarch, Seth believes Gavin will “have the opportunity to be a leader instead of a follower.”

The Monarch will be publicly available in September and eligible for purchase with Federal Quota funds. Stay tuned to the website, APH News, and your email inbox for more information on this upcoming device.