Hi All
Sorry for delay in responding to this msg but I feel that it has to be said
that the Aria has a lot of problems.
I purchase one two years ago to support my studies. I had a lot of problems
with it. I've lost countless number of files that contained important
lecture notes and found the battery to be very unreliable. Robotron had a
E-mail list but then decided to discontinue it.
I would advise anyone to think twice about purchasing one of these
unreliable machines.
Gena J
Gena J
Mobile
07801659097
-----Original Message-----
From: VICUG-L: Visually Impaired Computer Users' Group List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Kelly Pierce
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 1998 6:54 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: tech: an alternative to the braille & speak
from the november 1997 issue of the braille forum.
ROBOTRON'S ARIA: IT DOES EVERYTHING BUT SING!
by Nolan Crabb
So you're thinking about one of those portable notetakers with a
braille keyboard. You're thinking about buying one, but you can't get
excited about it. You've seen the Braille 'N Speak, after all, and
while it does a fine job at what it does, something somewhere's
nagging at you forcing you to wonder if there isn't an alternative.
Indeed, there is. It's available at a good price, especially when you
consider the capabilities. It's called the Aria, a product of
Robotron, an Australian manufacturer of adaptive equipment for blind
users. The Aria has so much to offer that you can't afford to ignore
it as an option.
It appears that Robotron is committed to making serious inroads into
the U.S. market with its Aria. If you've ever seen or used a Braille
'N Speak, you have some idea as to the dimensions of the Aria. Like
the Braille 'N Speak, it's designed to serve as a notetaker,
clock/calendar, and calculator. But in fairness to both products,
that's where the comparisons have to end. You see, the Aria is not
merely a dedicated word processor with extra features. It's an actual
computer with a DOS- compatible operating system. With the Aria, you
can import and export files in WordPerfect, copy files from one
directory to another as you would in DOS using a regular computer, and
more. These are very different machines. If you're a traveler who
takes lots of notes on the go, the Aria might be what you're looking
for.
The Aria can use memory cards which allow you to have the fast
equivalent of a hard disk inside the machine. The unit we borrowed
from Technologies for the Visually Impaired, Inc., the primary
Robotron dealer in the U.S., did not include a memory card. Still, it
worked fine without one. With one inserted, however, you have pretty
solid computing power at your disposal.
While the machine has a braillewriter-style keyboard, it also offers
function keys and cursor keys like a full-sized computer. The function
keys carry out various tasks depending upon which Aria feature you're
working in at the time. Setting It Up:
Running the setup routines for the Aria is easily accomplished. In the
setup, you can determine whether you want grade 1, grade 2 or computer
braille. You can set the speech volume, pitch, rate, inflection, and
more simply by moving the cursor keys through the various talking
menus. Once set up, the machine remains as you set it. (I lost full
battery power once and lost all my settings, but they can be saved to
a memory card for easy retrieval if necessary. I experienced that loss
only once during the eight weeks or so I used the machine.) The Word
Processor:
When you turn on the Aria, it sounds a beep, then seconds later a harp
chord plays. While you may not have a divine or angelic computing
session every time, that harp sound reminds you that this machine
includes an impressive sound chip capable of producing voice,
primitive beeps, great sound effects, touchtone telephone keypad
sounds, and musical sounds. The Aria is capable of playing WAV files
files that produce music or sound usually associated with DOS or
Windows-based computers. After the harp plays, you can tap function
key 1 to enter the built-in word processor. Once you're there, you can
simply begin typing or set up your pages and margins. There's a
special effects menu for bolding and underlining text, page numbering,
page breaks, tabs, and more. A two-keystroke combination lets you save
your files, import them, and export them. You can import files from
other sources and export them as WordPerfect, Wordstar or other file
formats. You can do the kind of things you might expect to do with a
word processor block text, move text, spell check your document,
count the words, etc. Of course, you can print to either an
Epson-compatible or LaserJet-compatible printer. The Aria has some
substantially flexible braille translation capabilities that would let
you connect a braille printer to the computer and produce respectable
braille. The Clock:
The Aria includes built-in clock, stopwatch, and timer functions. In
addition, you can set reminder alarms and a wake- up alarm that would
bring the heaviest sleeper to his trembling feet. It begins with a
loud rooster crow then blows an incredibly loud, obnoxious and
persistent train whistle until you stop it. There's no snooze feature,
but after being hit with that train whistle, you'll be grabbing the
Aria and your clothes simultaneously.
This is a wonderful machine for those ham operators or shortwave
listeners who want to keep track of their local time and Coordinated
Universal Time (UTC) concurrently. You can set your local time and
then have the clock keep track of another time zone. You can swap the
two around or simply have one spoken then the other. It's great for
those contact logs you want to keep. The Calculator:
The calculator is very full featured as nearly as I could tell. It
appears that the scientific functions are robust, and you can
entertain yourself for hours converting miles to kilometers, liters to
gallons, Fahrenheit temperatures to centigrade ones and much more. If
you're just balancing the checkbook or doing relatively simple
day-to-day kinds of calculations, you won't even stretch this
calculator function. Telecommunications:
The telecommunications capability of this machine is one of the best
things it has to offer. You don't need special added software.
Everything's built in, including the protocols or languages needed for
computers to smoothly send and receive files.
The Aria allows for easy setup of the terminal and serial port, and
the communications with an Internet server or other on- line service
are smooth and seamless. Of course, you'll still need a modem. For the
person on the go interested in quickly sending and receiving files,
the Aria truly shines. For what it's worth, this machine can also
function as a DecTalk- compatible speech synthesizer. Please realize
that while it is DecTalk compatible, it sounds nothing like a DecTalk.
The Telephone Directory:
A braille notetaker wouldn't be worth much if it didn't offer the
ability to create some kind of address book that includes phone
numbers. In this area, the Aria does nicely. You can create telephone
directories of almost unlimited size. I didn't like the address
feature particularly. I would have liked a feature that would allow
multiple addresses for individuals. But the actual phone number
portion more than made up for the address inconvenience. In fact, I
was downright dazzled by it. The Aria can not only store your phone
directory, it can actually dial the number for you. Simply hold your
telephone mouthpiece up to the Aria's speaker, tap a key, and the
sound chip comes alive and sounds the telephone keypad tones.
This is a must-have feature especially if you're a ham operator who
wants to connect to the public telephone system with your radio. While
most handheld ham radios have telephone keypads on them, there may be
times when you want to dial without someone seeing the special codes
you may have to enter to connect your radio to the telephone system.
By holding your radio near the Aria, you could have the computer do
the dialing for you while you hold down the push-to-talk key.
You don't have to be something as esoteric as a ham operator to enjoy
this feature. Those long-distance codes that can tax your memory can
be stored safely in the Aria and effortlessly dialed from your hotel
room or even a phone booth.
You can sort the phone directory and search it for names. You can even
load a separate directory should you want to do so. The Diary:
The diary lets you set up appointments that can be sorted, searched,
and edited. The calendar here is OK, but it could be easier to use.
You can determine on what day of the week a certain date will occur,
and you can figure out quickly the number of days from one date to
another. The File Manager:
The Aria's file manager lets you rename, delete, copy, search for a
specific file, tag or mark files for further manipulation, change the
file attributes, remove a directory from the built-in RAM disk or the
memory card, format a drive, and speak the status of your disk. It's
pretty comprehensive and relies heavily on the function keys, as do
most of the other Aria features. Battery Life:
While battery life may depend somewhat on the intensive nature of the
task you've asked the Aria to perform, I got somewhere between six and
ten hours on a charge. Robotron says the battery can be fully charged
in three hours. You can determine how much battery life is left by a
three-key combination. The battery's life is measured in percent. When
charging, the Aria simply says "charging." I found the battery
percentage gauge somewhat unreliable. At one point, I was assured by
the machine that I had 100 percent of battery life. A bit later, that
percentage had slipped to 75. That's natural enough. But when the
gauge mysteriously rebounded to 100 percent a few minutes later, I had
to question the integrity of the gauge or the battery. Of course, with
NiCad batteries, anything is possible, so placing blame entirely on
the equipment may not be fair. The Manual:
The folks at Robotron certainly know how to write a user's manual.
This one is extremely clear, concisely written, and very logically
presented. If I were buying a notetaker for the first time, I'd
consider the Aria because of the clarity of the manual. Regardless of
your experience or lack thereof with notetakers, you can teach
yourself how to use this machine quite easily with the manual.
Having said all that, I admit I yearned for a reference section where
the commands were all laid out with brief explanations. Some kind of
reference card would be valuable to first-time users. The cassette
version of the manual is thoroughly tone indexed, and the Australian
accent of the narrator makes listening to it a novel experience. If
you have to judge a product by its manual to some degree, the Aria
gets high marks on that alone. So Is It Perfect?
The Aria's far from perfect. In fact, there are some starkly negative
things about the unit that should force any buyer to take a hard look
at the machine before the wallet comes out.
First, I never got used to the keyboard. In fairness to Robotron, I
should admit that while I learned to use a braillewriter at age four,
I've always been somewhat faster on a good old qwerty keyboard. So
there's my bias up front. Still, I use a Braille 'N Speak rather
heavily, and I've achieved a respectable speed with it. Not so with
the Aria keyboard. It feels spongy rather than springy. I had to use a
moderate amount of pressure just to get the right keystrokes. More
than once, I've attempted to check the battery life only to find
myself in the initial setup section called mode. I think the keys are
just too far apart and the action too unresponsive to ever make this
machine a keyboard aficionado's dream. Add to that the fact that you
can choose between two keyboard settings only click keys and spoken
keys. Those rapid typists among us would prefer a silent keys setting
where it neither clicked nor spoke when a key was depressed. The
absence of this silent key setting is a real problem for anyone who
doesn't want to hear constant clicking or letters spoken through the
earphone or speaker.
Keyboard performance is a very subjective thing, however. I strongly
recommend you play with one of these units a bit before buying if
possible. You may find the keyboard OK, but I never got used to it.
There were times when the design of this unit bugged me. To simply
turn it off, for example, you have to press all four cursor keys at
once. If you ever played Twister as a kid, this Aria turning-off
exercise will bring back fond memories. It feels like a miniature game
of hand twister every time you turn it off. Come on, guys. If you're
serious about the U.S. market, give us a simple on/off switch. I'll
bet there isn't a prospective American buyer who wouldn't pay another
50 cents or so to get a convenient on/off switch. Heck, we might even
pay a buck or two for it. This machine with its multiple simultaneous
keystrokes isn't designed with touch typists in mind. You have to take
your hands off the six writing keys in order to hit a function key or
a shifted function key. In some instances, the shift key and the
function key will be at nearly opposite ends of the computer,
necessitating a two-handed approach. In its defense, the Aria is small
and there had to be some keyboard compromises made to keep it that
way. If small's the name of your game, chances are you will tolerate
most, but probably not all, of the keyboard compromises.
I initially hated the speech in the Aria. As one who loves to crank
the rate of a synthesizer to something akin to astronomical heights, I
figured I could stand any voice. The Braille 'N Speak's speech chip
comes up with some pretty primitive sounding speech much of the time.
Initially, I thought the Aria was worse. As I worked with it and
learned to manipulate it more to my liking, I'd say the Aria might be
slightly better at some things. I had a difficult time making the
speech pronunciation dictionary work correctly. The Bottom Line:
The multiple capabilities of the Aria make it a good deal for the
price. Interactive games are now available, the word processor is
probably adequate for most needs, and the telecommunications and
telephone directory enhance the value of the machine a great deal. The
calendar and diary are probably the most lackluster features, and the
reminder alarms you can set for appointments or whatever may not be
loud enough to get your attention if you're doing something away from
the Aria. If you like braillewriter keyboards, you'll probably want to
consider buying this machine.
At press time, the Aria costs $1,245. The price includes a two
megabyte flash RAM card. Other packaging options are available,
including external storage devices. You can upgrade the unit simply by
downloading new software; no need to send it back for chip
replacements. For additional information, contact TFVI, 9 Nolan Ct.,
Hauppauge, NY 11788. Tel. (516) 724-4479. E- mail: [log in to unmask]
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