In my blog post entitled The Magic Of The Monarch, written in May 2025, I described my excitement at purchasing a Monarch and using it to read multiline Braille and exploring tactile diagrams.
But version 1.3 of the software has just been released, and with it comes another feature that continues to blow my mind! Allow me to introduce Wing IT!
Wing It is an application found on the Monarch’s menu, and can also be downloaded from the App Store for use on your iPhone or iPad. If you open Wing It on the Monarch, it will advise you to open the same app on your phone, and accept the location and Bluetooth permissions, then invite you to connect so that the Monarch application and the same one on your phone communicate with each other.
So then what? Well, the app on your phone has several icons along the bottom of the screen. (note that you need to use this app in landscape mode.) From left to right when your phone is in landscape mode with the charge port to the right, you will find:
- Advanced
- Style
- Shape
- Tool
- Edit
- Fill
- View
- File
- Canvas
- Connect
- Move
- Undo
- Clear
Most of these icons are self-explanatory. When you want to connect the Monarch to Wing It, you would double-tap the Connect button to do so.
For me though, the excitement is only just beginning at this point. If you double-tap on the Canvas button, you are now placed in a drawing area on your phone, and anything you start to do from here on will appear on the surface of the Monarch. Now if, at this juncture, you are thinking ‘big deal,’ then you might not want to bother reading the rest of this post. If, however, you are like me and completely mesmerised by what the Monarch can do, read on!
In the canvas area on my phone, I started drawing angles and lines, just to see what would appear on the surface of the Monarch. As I am blind from birth, my drawings are not going to be your Vincent Van Gogh artistry, but the point is that Wing It allows you to create with immediacy. Imagine you are a blind student, and you can’t grasp the concept of different triangles being discussed in a geometry class. So your teacher takes your phone or iPad and starts to draw an Isosceles triangle. What the teacher has drawn is then replicated on the surface of the Monarch so you have that triangle under your fingertips. You can use tools from the icons in Wing It to add more complex shapes, styles and manipulate them on your phone that then appear on the Monarch. You can also create labels for your masterpieces and save them on your phone or iPad.
When I first read about the Apple Pencil, I imagined someone developing a tool where you could draw on your phone’s screen and have some sort of tactile representation under your fingertips. Well Wing It does this in conjunction with Monarch which is even better as Monarch’s surface is larger than the screen on your phone or iPad.
I am at an early stage with Wing It and appreciate there is a lot more to come and learn with the two devices. Again, I just wish it was feasible for more schools, particularly here in the UK, to have the budget for a Monarch at their disposal because I see so much potential when it comes to literacy and numeracy in education. And with the prospect of multiline Braille support in both JAWS and NVDA only weeks away now, it’s a very exciting time for anyone who loves tactile graphics and Braille.
For further information on Wing It, watch these videos on YouTube produced by the American Printing House (APH):