[access-uk] Re: Perkins and Penfriend

  • From: "Barry Hill" <bbinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:28:32 +0100

Thanks, John.  I found this info very interesting and informing, so I'm glad
the *bureaucrat from RNIB* wrote it.
 
Cheers
 
Barry
 

  _____  

From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
John
Sent: 20 July 2009 5:56 PM
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Perkins and Penfriend 


Hello everyone, 
I'm on this list as a private individual but in my "day job" I am Head of
Products and Publications for RNIB  and having seen some recent exchanges I
thought I could be helpful with some comments and information. 
First the Perkins. Yes the price is high but this isn't because anybody is
taking a big margin or making a profit. Certainly the Perkins in the UK is
significantly cheaper than almost anywhere else in the developed world.
Prices in Europe and Australia were at over £600 last year and will be
increasing again. We have been hit in the UK by the weakness of the pound
against the dollar and the Perkins is costing us more. 
There are some alternatives like the Tatrapoint but whenever we have
imported and sold them here they have never been at all popular.  The recent
increase in the Perkins price though will cause us to look at the
alternatives again. In the meantime RNIB has a website with information
about a wide range of products including Braille writing machines which you
can find at
http://www.tiresias.org/research/devices/index.htm. The information for the
most part was last updated just over a year ago and  there are links and
email addresses for most suppliers so you can follow them up for updated
details and prices. 
Something  you won't find on there yet are our new upward writing Braille
frames. . As well as the little pocket Braille King (named after the man in
RNIB who designed it) we now have two single line A4 width frames which
incorporate a roller mechanism. One of these is an upward writer which means
you prick out the dots from left to right and form the characters the right
way round. You can roll out the paper, read what you've written and roll it
back to carry on. Of course this is no good for writing long letters but
it's fine for short notes, labels etc. There is also a conventional downward
writing version of the Roller frame for people who are used to the right to
left writing of traditional frames. I was never taught that at school and
personally find the new upward writing frames very much easier to use. The
roller frames cost £29.99 and the upward has the product code BF22 and the
traditional roller is BF23. They are both on the online shop. Easiest way to
find them is to do a search for "roller". I know they aren't writing
machines as such but if somebody wants something low cost that you can use
for occasional short things then they might fit the bill.   
As to the issue of prices. Generally RNIB in the UK offers lower prices than
most other similar organisations in other countries. We no longer directly
subsidise each item we sell. This is mainly for two reasons - first when we
offered a heavily subsidised price for individuals we found that
organisations such as schools and  social services   would get their clients
to buy at the subsidised price and then pay them back. This made their
budgets stretch further of course but also meant that RNIB's donated income
was subsidising government which is not what any of us would want. The
second reason for removing the direct subsidy is that it made it impossible
for other people to enter the market and compete. Commercial companies still
frequently complain that we are artificially affecting the market and making
it hard for people to compete. Well we are not in the business of making
life easy for commercial companies but we do want competition because it
sharpens manufacturers and suppliers, stimulates innovation  and generally
keeps us all on our toes.
If RNIB subsidised everything then the competition would disappear and we'd
all have to buy only products offered by RNIB. However commercial companies
will not go into any areas or product ranges where they can't make a return
on their investments. So if you go to somewhere like Sight Village you will
see dozens of video magnifiers  but hardly any choice of Braille writers and
tactile watches.
We do have a mission to bring prices down generally and you may be aware of
things like our Seika Braille display which is about half the price of any
other similar device, the new Synergy CCTV/Video magnifier which we designed
with Humanware which is about £500 cheaper than other devices with the same
functionality. We have new tactile watches specially designed for us and
selling at £17.99 which is undoubtedly a good price compared to previous
products
Then there is our much-talked of Penfriend which is much cheaper than any
previous similar labelling product. You may shortly see our RNIB Penfriend
on sale in other countries but in all cases the price will be higher. 
Just for the record I can say, as the man on the video, that we  did not
artificially enhance the sound of the product nor would we ever. We made the
video cheaply and quickly in my office with the objective of giving people a
better idea of what the product does for people who wouldn't easily get to
Sight Village or a resource centre. 
We were very keen to get the product into the UK for sight village because
it's a good way of getting the word out quickly and widely about new
products. One of the things that saddens me most is coming across people who
simply had no idea that some products exist and are needlessly struggling
and getting frustrated with simple everyday tasks. We had expected the
products to arrive two weeks before Sight Village but they are made out in
China to keep costs down and you can't always be absolutely sure on delivery
from such a distance. They were hand delivered to our stand on the Wednesday
by the inventor and also some are in our warehouse in Peterborough.   They
should all be with customers by the weekend. 4,000 in total are due by mid
August and once production is better matched to demand things should be much
smoother. Just for information RNIB runs on average at 5 per cent out of
stock with products which is actually a very good position. So on 95 per
cent of occasions products are in stock - though of course it never feels
like that when  you personally order something which isn't available.
Well I'll leave it there for now. I have been reluctant to comment on
discussions on this list because I worry that people will think that their
conversations are being watched by the bureaucrat from RNIB but if list
members would welcome our engaging more often with some factual commentaries
on issues that have been raised then I would gladly do so.
John

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