A new kind of touch-screen technology could bring Braille to cellphone displays, allowing the blind to read mobile content — if they do a little extra learning first. Best of all, it can be done with existing screens.
Researchers at the University of Tampere in Finland took a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and wrote custom software that would vibrate the piezoelectric layer in the touch-screen to mimic the bumps felt in the 3x2 matrix of dots that make up a Braille character.
When the reader puts his finger on the screen, raised dots are “displayed" by a fast, intense vibration. Gaps are represented by a lower level, longer lasting buzz. According to the New Scientist, when a sequence of six dots is pulsed at 360 milliseconds apart, each character could be read in little over a second.
Because of the temporally linear nature of the pulses, even those used to the parallel delivery of normal Braille had to do some work to learn the new sequence, but it didn’t take long. The technology could be added to any phone with a piezoelectric layer in the display and screen-reading software would be even simpler to implement than text to speech.
The project is still experimental, but with so few barriers, it could become real very quickly.
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