Vibrating Braille: Now the blind can text and “read” SMS
In a recent survey done by my blogger friend drew, this was one of the questions he asked:”If there is one thing that has not been done on the Internet that you would like to see, what would it be? ” My reply was: “Internet for the blind. (imagine, bulag nag susurf ng net.. naglalaro ng dota, nakikipag socialize sa friendster, myspace)”.
Now, relate that to the mobile world, imagine a blind sending sms and he gets a reply.. now he “reads” the message.
Its not possible? it is.. as 73-year-old former teacher Sadao Hasegawa, Tsukuba University of Technology professor Nobuyuki Sasaki and other developers have deviced the so called Vibrating Braille!
When a caller pushes numbers on the keypad corresponding to Braille symbols, two terminals attached to the receiver’s phone vibrate at a specific rate to create a message.
The developers are now working to make the devices that convert keypad information into vibrations smaller than their current size (16 centimeters by 10 centimeters). If vibration-based Braille is applied more widely, it may enable information to be “broadcast” to several blind people at once.
Article and pic source: Far east gizmos
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I think a group of DLSU students also did something like this for their thesis.