Perkins Brailler

Today, we will check out our Perkins braille writer. Now, we will use our brailler to write or emboss braille right onto paper, and we will actually learn all of our knobs and keys as we begin using our brailler today.

So let's jump right in and check it all out. Okay, we have our brailler right here in front of us, and we know we're good to go because all of our keys are on the side that is facing us. Now, before we can begin writing braille, we will, of course, need to load our paper into our brailler, but before we can load our paper, there's a couple of things we'll need to do.

First, we'll find the round knobs on the side of our brailler, and these are our paper roller knobs. Now, this is super important: We will want to roll these as far out or away from us as they'll go. Otherwise, our paper might get jammed up in our brailler, and we don't want that. Now, we'll know we're rolling them out because our thumbs will push the tops of our knobs towards the back of our brailler. So let's go ahead and roll them all the way out.

Next, we'll need to find our embosser head lever, and our embosser head lever is kind of cupped-shaped and just above all of our keys here. Yeah, we'll need to slide it all the way to our left. So we'll just go ahead and slide it left. Now, our paper release levers are on the top left and right of our brailler. They're either flat or they have a little rounded ball on the end. Yeah, so these will actually hold our paper in place. Now, to load our paper, we will need to pull our paper release levers all the way towards us. So we'll just pull them forward here, and there you go! We are ready to load our paper.

Now, if we reach over the top of our brailler, we'll find a small flat surface. It feels kind of like a little shelf. Well, our paper will actually lay flat on this shelf. Now, all the way to the left on our shelf, we will find our embosser head. It's a small, metal piece that kind of points out towards the back of our brailler, and our paper will slide under our embosser head here as well, so let's do it. Yeah, to load our braille paper, we will hold our paper on each side, kind of pinched between our thumbs and fingers. And we'll hold it flat behind our brailler as we slide it onto our paper shelf, and remember, just under the embosser head. Then we'll slide paper all the way to the left, and we'll push our paper release levers back to keep our paper from slipping out. And voila! Our paper is snug in place.

All right, we are ready to roll our paper in. So we will just turn our paper roller knobs towards us, and we'll roll them all the way in until our paper stops. Again, we'll know we are rolling them in because our thumbs will be pulling the tops of our knobs towards the front of our brailler. So we'll just roll in our paper here. Yeah, our paper is rolled all the way in, and only about one line width of paper is left sticking out from our brailler, here on top of our paper shelf.

Okay, just one more step and we will have our paper all loaded. Now remember, our keys are all facing us, and our key farthest to our left here is our little round line advance key, and we will give it one good press to set our paper in place here. So we'll just press our line advance key. Yeah, we hear a nice little click to let us know that our paper is set, and there you go. We have loaded our braille paper.

And we're just about ready to begin brailling, but before we begin pounding out our first novel, we'll need to set our margins. All right, on the back of our brailler we will find two metal pieces that can be pinched together, and these are our margin setters. Yeah, we can pinch our margin setters and slide them left or right to set our margins. So we will slide our left margin setter all the way to the left, and we'll slide it left here. And we will want to slide our right margin setter to the right so that it's lined up near the right edge of our paper, and that way our embosser head will stop before it goes off the end of our paper. All right, we'll just set our right margin here. Great! Our margins are all set.

So how about we go ahead and do some brailling. Okay, we have six matching oblong keys, and these are our embossing keys. Now we are going to want to place our left index finger for dot one, our middle finger for dot two, and our ring finger for dot three on our left three embossing keys. And we will place our right index finger for dot four, our middle finger for dot five, and, last but not least, we will place our ring finger for dot six on our right three embossing keys. All right, we're all set.

So how about we press our embossing keys down all at the same time here, and we'll just press here. Great! We have written our first braille, and if we feel on top of our paper shelf and just to the left of our embosser head, we will find a full braille cell, and I tell you, that is pretty fantastic. Okay, we do have a couple more keys here to check out. Right between our embosser keys, we will find our space bar, and this acts just like the spacebar on our computer keyboard. So pressing our space bar will advance our embosser head and place a space between our braille cells, and if we just so happen to want to back up a space or two, we have our handy little round backspace key all the way to the right of our embosser keys here.

Okay, how about we go ahead and write a whole line of braille. Now, it doesn't matter which embosser keys we're pressing today because, hey, this is all for fun. So we'll just braille a whole line here, and we'll just braille some braille cells here, a space, maybe some more, maybe backspace, a little more braille. Great, and we just heard a little ding. So we know we have reached near the end of our line. Yeah, and we'll just press our line advance key to move or advance our paper up to the next line, and we'll just press it here. Great, and we will just slide our embosser head lever all the way back to the left. Yeah, and there you go!

We are ready to begin embossing our next line of braille. Okay, let's say that we have finished brailling. Well, we will use our paper roller knobs again to roll our paper out of our brailler, and we will roll them all the way out until they can't go any further. So we'll just roll our paper out. Great, our paper is all rolled out, and you've probably already guessed that we'll simply pull our paper release levers towards us, and our paper will just slide right out. Yeah, so we'll pull our levers towards us here.

And, hey, we did it! I tell you, with just a little practice, we will be loading up our Perkins braille writer and brailling away with ease.