Before making a recommendation, I need to know critical information about a device, including its ease of use, tasks it can perform, how well it can perform these tasks, its command structure, the documentation that is included and cost. I have found that the Braille Companion by Pulse Data International, available through HumanWare, fulfills all of the criteria that I have identified for myself and for those consumers with whom I work. Its documentation is clear and easy to follow, it effectively performs a variety of tasks the user needs to accomplish every day, its menu and command structure are consistent and logical, and it is worth its price. At the heart of the Braille Companion is the KeySoft personal productivity software suite. Each KeySoft task, and the items within it, are accessed through a logical menu structure, eliminating the need to learn commands required in other personal organizers.
Commands are necessary when editing, but the same edit and review commands are used for every task.
The Braille Companion enables users to keep an address book, schedule appointments, communicate with other computers, and create, edit and print a wide variety of documents. Although some other notetakers do have these features, their users need to learn special commands to access them. By using the menus, the prompts that I was given and the context-sensitive help that was provided, I was able to enter, edit and browse appointments, set an alarm, write address book entries and look up addresses. KeySoft's word processor is a modern, full-featured, dynamic editor that enables simplistic tasks such as notetaking, as well as more complicated tasks, such as writing term papers, case notes, reports, and other highly formatted documents. Other notetakers do allow changing both line and page layouts, but the Braille Companion is the only one that allows the user to choose different fonts.