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A Braille e-Book Reader Concept

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braille_book Tis a morning for concepts it seems. This just makes a lot of logical sense to me and I’d like to see it happen. Designers Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, sun-Hye Woo and Jin-Sun Park have come up with a Braille e-Book reader concept that uses an electroactive polymer to raise Braille dots on a screen when a charge is received.

This could be a real boon to those who need to use Braille to read as it would certainly more than cut down on the bulk of printed Braille texts and could potentially make more books available to those who are sight-impaired.

Via Yanko Design

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Bob

    04/22/2009 at 8:47 am

    Great concept, and this technology is not just for the blind. If a transparent polymer of this type were somehow overlaid over a touchscreen LCD, then on-screen keyboards would be much easier to type on. Combine this with haptic response or a Blackberry Storm-type clickable screen, and on-screen keyboards may begin to rival hardware keyboards on small mobile devices.

  2. Jim

    04/22/2009 at 12:11 pm

    Imagine…text to Braille capability. Record meeting notes or conversations that turn to Braille using the electroactive polymer.
    Just thinking out loud!

  3. Jim

    04/22/2009 at 12:13 pm

    …that is speech to Braille :)

  4. DMM

    04/23/2009 at 4:57 am

    What a great concept! I’ve seen numerous devices that have one line of refreshable braille. This is the first time I’ve seen one that has multiple lines of refreshable braille.

    The one drawback is that these braille cells are *expensive* to make. Put the term “refreshable braille” through a search engine and look at some of the prices of the items that have this feature. 40- and 80-cell devices are costly, so an entire page’s worth of these braille cells might be jaw-droppingly expensive to produce.

    Here’s to seeing items like this one being produced, and the cost of producing them coming down so people can actually afford to have them.

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