braille

An interaction designer who makes sci-fi short films has spent the past three years developing what he says is the world's first Braille-enabled smartphone. He said that if testing goes well, the phones could hit stores by the end of this year.

Thanks in part to award money from Rolex, India-based designer Sumit Dagar has been collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad to develop a prototype. The smartphone employs a haptic touch screen that elevates and depresses the content it receives, thereby transforming the data into touchable patterns.

Yes, this phone is essentially a shapeshifter.… Read more

LAS VEGAS--The Canopy Sensus is a new touch-sensitive case that does more than just provide protection or add style to your iPhone. This case lets you interact with apps using multitouch surfaces on both the right side and back of the case.

The Sensus looks like a regular case that protects the sides and back of your iPhone, and Canopy says the industrial design exceeds marketplace protection standards. But with an app that supports it, you can touch and swipe on the back and right side of the case to interact with apps and games.

Though Canopy showed only a … Read more

Most of us have at least tried to text without looking at our phones before. I confess to having shot off a quick message while stopped at a red light, or immediately following crazy goals and tackles at soccer matches, or even from the confines of my pocket at parties.

Now a free, open-source app called BrailleTouch is about to make this form of multitasking that much easier--for the visually impaired and sighted alike.

Designed at Georgia Tech, the app incorporates the Braille writing system into a touch-screen device. It essentially turns an iPhone's touch screen into a soft-touch … Read more

New Facebook interaction added to eBay, Siri has some quirky answers, and BlackBerry service is restored, but will there be compensation for down time?

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Software developed during a summer course at Stanford University could one day radically shift the way the visually impaired use modern tablets, potentially removing the need for a wireless Braille display.

Adam Duran, a senior at New Mexico State University, has developed a stunning way for blind people to type on tablets. Duran created the touch-screen Braille writer software with Adrian Lew, a Stanford assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a doctoral candidate.

It's all in the fingertips. The eight keys (similar to a standard Braille keyboard) in the software do not have a predefined position, but rather work with the location of the fingers. A user simply presses eight fingers anywhere on the screen, and voila, the keys are automatically oriented to that location.

If there's a problem, users simply lift their fingers and put them down again. As shown in the video below, typing is a breeze. Curiously missing is the mention of haptic feedback (vibration), or voice support, but for a first version this software is very encouraging. … Read more

A group of engineering students has developed a portable, low-cost Braille printer that lets the blind and visually impaired easily label objects that feel similar to the touch, like DVDs.

The 6dot Braille Labelmaker is cheaper and easier to use than other label makers, according to the students from MIT, the University of Toronto, and Stanford University. Still in development, it might cost as little as $200 when released, less than half the cost of some other Braille label makers.

Users push six keys on the ergonomic device--one for each of the dots that make up a Braille character--to emboss … Read more

Touch-screen handsets may be the talk of the town, but they are useless to the visually impaired. A new software developed by Jussi Rantala and his colleagues at the University of Tampere in Finland attempts to address that by bringing Braille to touch-enabled mobile devices.

The team installed a software on the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet with a piezoelectric layer that "displays" a raised dot on the touch screen with a single intense vibration and an absent one with a longer and weaker pulse. … Read more

Leopard is Apple's best-looking operating system yet, from its breezy Cover Flow file browsing to the starry-looking Time Machine backup. It's no wonder visual artists love Macs.

But how well does Leopard work for blind users?

"[Vision-impaired] people who use Macs are mostly in the category of, "My boss says we have to use Macs," or "I'm a teacher and that's what I'm stuck with,"" said Crista Earl, director of Web operations at the American Foundation for the Blind.

Among 10 million visually impaired people in the United States, … Read more