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Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

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Re: Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

#31

Post by User23 »

nerdponx wrote: post #22
bluGill wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than 90% of blind people can see the sun. In the us blind means you vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200, without glasses my vision is worse than that, so if I can do it without glasses some blind can as well. (Of course my vision is correctable to perfection)

Interesting, I only ever imagined blindness to be total darkness and absence of sight. One great example among many of how you can't effectively design accommodations for a particular disability without getting input from someone who has that disability.

Other blind people see a flashing shifting colorful mess in their field of vision. I know someone who can even mentally control the perception of the visual disruption to an extent, like making it flash different colors.

The visual system from the eye to the brain and everything between is incredibly complex and can fail in all kinds of different ways.

Re: Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

#32

Post by Aerbil313 »

lemper wrote: post #3

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project. i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it? of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.

Why do people want braille displays? Sound is a faster, denser, and cheaper information exchange medium and our brains are pattern matching machines. I can easily imagine a screen output -> earphones technology that can provide the use of a screen.

Wait, why confine this to screens? There was a deaf guy in Popular Science years ago who wired the output of a microphone to his visual cortex. He was able to see the sounds, not interfering with his normal vision. Why is there no such product to wire a camera to the brain to enable vision in the blind?

Re: Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

#33

Post by bramd »

ms-fellag wrote: post #16
lemper wrote: post #3

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project. i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it? of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.

I will preface this by saying that i never built anything related to this, nor am i visually-impaired so take whatever i say with a grain of salt. However i have been interested in the subject on & off for quite sometime following some hype around Braille tablets a decade ago. (which sadly never materialized) > 30 units of display thingy They are usually called "Braille Cells" (sometimes called "piezoelectric braille…

Braille tablets/multiline braille displays are finally coming. The traditional piezo-electric cells are not well suited for them, due to the space the cell + driver+ electronics need. Putting the four rows of pins in a cell does already require staggering the elements. If you disassemble a cell, you'll see that every row has another pin length the bottom row usually has the longest and the top row the shortest pins. So this is not very scalable for multiple lines of dots.

There are two commercially produced techniques for multiline braille displays now: the first comes from Dot (a Korean company) who makes the Dotpad, this technique is also used in the Humanware/APH Monarch which will be an Android based standalone braille tablet. The other technique is created by Orbit Braille and they have their Graphity braille tablet. I couldn't find any good technical documentation that describe how these methods work exactly, so if anyone has any pointers I would like to read more about it.

Re: Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

#34

Post by contingencies »

lemper wrote: post #3

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project. i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it? of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project.

This already fell off the front page but I am actually working on exactly that project right now. The inspiration was standing around with my kid, seeing some braille and decoding it.

The cost of the current systems is associated with the volume of hard tooling and assembly work necessary to create the precision lever assemblies based on 1970s piezo technology.

Therefore, the initial R&D goal is to determine whether it may now be possible to achieve similar outcomes using alternate approaches to the actuation problem. Many people have tried but it seems all have failed to achieve the necessary combination of alternate actuation, spatial density and manufacturability within a low cost design goal.

Re: Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

#36

Post by devinprater »

local_issues wrote: post #25
nerdponx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I only ever imagined blindness to be total darkness and absence of sight. One great example among many of how you can't effectively design accommodations for a particular disability without getting input from someone who has that disability.

Fun fact! Unless you have no eyes or no optic nerve, you'll basically always see something. Even 100% blind people can still see shadows, movement, the sun, etc. Most of the "blind" definition is around driving and reading.

I'm blind with only light perception, but I cannot see movement or shadows. Another fun fact I guess.
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