[accessibleimage] New pocket-size Braille system
- From: "Judi Piscitello" <JPISCITE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <accessibleimage@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:49:16 -0400
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."
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