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