Illustration for article titled Braille E-Reader Concept Raises Dots with E-Ink

Braille books are mighty thick, so while I remain skeptical of standard e-book readers' utility, a braille version would make it much easier for the blind to carry books with them.

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This particular concept was designed by Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo & Jin-Sun Park, and it uses an electroactive polymer to raise the braille dots when a charge is passed through certain areas of the screen.

And for those familiar with braille, it's probably easier than listening to Kindle's disputed text-to-speech robot.

[Yanko Design]

DISCUSSION

crackblind
crackblind

It'll all be about the pricing. Refreshable Braille displays are incredibly expensive & can be delicate (breaking 1 pin in the display kinda screws the whole thing up).

But there is existing tech on this already. Portable Braille notetakers can take practically any standard text file (txt, doc & xml) and translate it to readable Braille. There are line length issues because of the number of cells on the display. The only benefit of this is a complete page - which is important to Braille readers.