Sunday, November 18, 2012

Braille ereaders?

I got interested in the idea of a "Braille e-reader", in other words a Braille reader which does not print on paper, but instead have a "screen" with little pins popping up (barely) on the surface to make the braille letters. You would just feed in an electronic text, the first page would show, the blind person reads it, presses a button, and the next page turns up.
It should not be too hard to make, methinks. But all I've seen is machines printing on paper. Does this "ereader" exist, anybody knows?

... Further googling:
Engadget hopes it's not far away.
The displays exists, of a sort, but: "Because of the complexity of producing a reliable display that will cope with daily wear and tear, these displays are expensive. Usually, only 40 or 80 braille cells are displayed."

Another thing of course is that now we have text-to-speech, and the latest iteration in the Kindle Fire HD is actually really good, I read whole books with it.

This is a mock-up, not real.

3 comments:

TC [Girl] said...

Another thing of course is that now we have text-to-speech, and the latest iteration in the Kindle Fire HD is actually really good, I read whole books with it.

Good to know. I need to try that, one of these days. Was trying to sell my "old" Fire, today, so that I could get the new one. I hadn't even thought of that, before; does the first Fire have text-to-speech capabilities? I don't recall. Must go investigate.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

Timo Lehtinen said...

Braille readers, or rather braille displays, have been around since the 1950s. How did you think blind people have been using the computer for all these years?

There is not that big of an advantage to having multiple lines of braille displayed on top of each other; you can only read one line at a time anyway. And I would imagine it helps if you don't have to move your hands vertically in order to access the next line.