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New Graphic Displays for the Blind
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Spain have invented a new mechanism for graphical tactile displays for the blind. The displays use metallic films featuring various shape memory alloys which are produced layer by layer on silicon wafers using thin film technology. Display pixels are generated when the metallic film adjusts its curvature partially, similarly to bimetal snap plates for temperature switches. The movement of the films is then transferred to the touch panel via plastic pins und thus can be detected by the user."
I.e. I realize that something that is fairly "color deep" like my christmas webcam is probably undoable, but what about simple stuff like a red rose?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Why can't they just use the CLI? The only good reason not to is for multimedia, which obviously a blind person wouldn't care about, and multiple virtual terminals, which nowadays you can just do with Ctrl+F1, Ctrl+F2, etc. Why not use that instead of this presumably horribly expensive item?
Le français vous intéresse?
It's a bunch of pins going through a board that you can press your hand or face or whatever against and make an impression.(I did some googling for this, but the terms I could think of were too general)
If you could put a servo on each of those pins, it seems like you could pretty easily achieve the same result.
You might wonder why these devices need to be so complex when Braille is just a series of dots. The thing is that Braille is a lot more complex than people think. (I think this is interesting but apologies if it's a little off-topic.)
Type I Braille is basically a 1:1 mapping of letter onto 2x3 arrays of dots. It's not much more than a font, but this is what people tend to think of as Braille.
Type II Braille uses a lot of abbreviations, and is rather more complex to read. For example, certain punctuation marks coincide with word abbrevations, and only the context serves to differentiate the too.
Type III Braille is still more complex and is almost like a whole other language. I don't know much more about it than that, but anyone who does can add to this.
So you see that the increasing complexity of these devices actually makes life a lot easier for blind computer users. I wonder how many blind people read Slashdot?
apterous.org
Why not just hook them up to the BrainPort? A step closer to helping them "see" again......
I think it would be interesting if the pixels actually made an audible snap when they change. I don't have any visual disabilities, but it would seem that Braille offers no equivalent to the peripheral vision sighted people use to take full advantage of a large graphical display. Such snap sounds (if done subtly enough) could be a small step in that direction. A "multimedia experience" of sorts for the visually impaired.
Then again, Braille terminals may already have this: in the movie Sneakers the terminal used by Whistler was making sounds as it was updated, but that may have been artistic license by the director.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
In this whole discussion it is forgotten that most blind people are not blind from birth. They would certainly benefit from the use of 'colours' in this way.
-- Cheers!