I was at a board meeting for DisabilityPride when visitor who happened to be blind pulled out an interesting device. It was a Braille display terminal. The device maintained a wireless connection to her cell phone. It had a pad with a series of bumps that could be electrically raised or lowered creating braille characters based on text transmitted from the phone. In this sense it functioned very much like a conventional display terminal except for a blind person.
The display portion of the device look like the picture above taken from an product on Amazon. the actual device was a little more complex with several buttons which appeared to be able to send text possibly in a similar manner to that used by pre-smartphones.
I was, of course, amazed at the technology. I have known for some time that such a device would be possible and probably not extremely difficult to build. In fact, I have her discussion about turning the entire touch sensitive screen of something like an iPad into a braille display using vibration rather than raising of dots. It is a little unclear how this would work or even if it is possible. What is amazing is how practical such a device can be.
As an aside, we might wonder in an age where more devices are learning to speak in more clever ways whether braille is becoming increasingly obsolete as are smart devices are able to read and interpret what they see for blind people without passing through the touch sensitive stage.
Nonetheless I applaud the makers of the device and the users who can use it so effectively.
