Vibrating touch screen puts Braille at the fingertips

Touch screen devices like the iPhone are great when you can see them, but not much good if you are blind. Now a new way of presenting Braille characters on a mobile device could be the first step towards a Braille-ready touch-screen phone, reports New Scientist.

In Braille, letters are encoded using a two-by-three matrix in which each character is represented by a different configuration of raised and absent dots at the six locations. To display these dots on a touch-screen device, Jussi Rantala of the University of Tampere in Finland and colleagues used a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has a piezoelectric material built into the touch screen that vibrates when an electric signal is applied to it.

The team installed software that represents a raised dot as a single pulse of intense vibration, and an absent dot as a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses (see diagram).

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emily | 2:49 PM | Technology |
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