Category: accessible Devices
Imagine rolling out a full-page braille display out of your Pacmate?
That would be neat.
Read on!
Netscape News
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
New pocket-size Braille system
Blind people may soon be reading messages using the world's first portable
electronic Braille.
The pocket-sized display, which can be rolled up like a newspaper, is
designed to connect to mobile phones and laptops.
Researchers in Japan have produced a 16-centimetre-square prototype just
one millimetre thick which weighs five grams.
It incorporates 144 plastic "paddles" beneath a thin rubber surface which
bend upwards when an electric current is applied.
On the tip of each paddle is a sphere under a millimetre across that rises
and produces a bump in the rubber.
The bumps produce the Braille message, which can be read the normal way by
feeling with the fingertips.
When the current is switched off, the paddles straighten and the bumps
disappear.
Inventor Takao Someya, from the University of Tokyo, will present the
device at the International Electron Devices meeting in Washington DC in
December, New Scientist magazine reported.
The device could go beyond Braille to allow the blind to feel images as
well as words, says Someya.
But Yoseph Bar-Cohen, an electronics expert at Nasa's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena said: "If a blind person cannot feel the movement of
the dots, the device will not be practical."
End.
mmm, me want, hehehehe
I'd SO love to have one of those!!
Oo! Sounds awesome! But does anyone know an estimated price for it? lolol
*sexy*
*Cringes at the thought of how much it'll cost*
The idea sounds neat, though. :-)
Gurhrhr! Sugar shoots herself for deleting the article! I think it said that, as it stands, they're set to be priced at around four thousand dollars American, but that there are potentially ways of making them that would decrease the price to around seven percent of that figure. Much more affordable. So, guess what'll be on my Christmas list when they come out? hehehehe
puggle wants one too
Ooh! *covets* I played with a Brailliant the other day, and got all enthused, and then asked the price and nearly fainted! So this one will sit on the "wish from afar", list, I think,