Mantis Q40
The verdict
The Mantis pairs with up to five devices over Bluetooth and works with JAWS, NVDA, and VoiceOver, so one display serves a phone, a tablet, and a computer. Over Wi-Fi it pulls Bookshare books and NFB Newsline directly, and it carries a book reader, an editor, a clock, and a calculator onboard — a braille workstation that fits in a bag without a laptop attached.
Mantis Q40 — about $2,682 · star rating unverified in our research (specialty-retailer product) · Blind pick — the QWERTY exception among 40-cell braille displays: a full laptop-style keyboard plus 40 refreshable cells, so a touch-typist never has to learn Perkins keys.
Specs
- QWERTY full laptop-style keyboard
- 40 refreshable cells
Blind details
For a blind buyer who already touch-types, this is the display that removes the learning curve: the keyboard you already know, under a braille line you can read. The five-device Bluetooth switching is the feature that matters day to day — phone for messages, laptop for work, tablet for reading, all on one display.
Honest caveats: edited documents save back as plain text, not in their original format, so round-tripping a formatted document loses its formatting. It ships without a portable carry case, and switching Bluetooth channels requires backing out to a menu rather than a quick key command. As of October 2026 it was listed in stock at $2,682 through APH, with other US blind retailers near $2,699.
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Last reviewed: October 2026.