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Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

I have been working for the past 7 years with a blind programmer. With a "tactile" watch, he can quickly know what time is it without minimal interaction with the hardware (open the lid, touch the watch, close the lid) and without disturbing the current course of action with other people. The same way you quickly check your watch.

What I see as really good if it can hit the market at that price is that it will help push down the price of braille strips. At the moment a strip costs about 100€ per cell. If you want a 80 cell strip to do some programming, it costs new about 8000€...

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Wouldn't that be better served by a notch on the ring that rotates as time goes? An inner ring could do minutes and small/large bumps can help identify the time down to the closest 5 minute increment

The machinery to translate scalar time into discrete bump movement is going to be complicate, fragile and costly, while rotating a ring instead of the single arms is feasible, has been done already and only need tactile feedback for feeling the relative positioning.

Edit: there http://www.perkinsproducts.org/store/748-thickbox_default/br...

Just add a second ring and you're basically done.

There is a second ring on the watch the runs along the edge. If you look at the 2 o'clock position you'll see the second ball.

What you've said can and does work for telling time, but from watching a few of their videos it looks like the watch part of this device is a secondary function. It connects to your phone and will display the caller's name or text messages like other smart watches, but in braille. I can't read braille, so don't know how effective that is with the limited space. It would be interesting to hear from a blind person what their current state of electronic connectedness is since this type of device is supposed to improve the parity between blind and non-blind individuals.

One of the cooler things mentioned in one of the videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmpl81WmFSo) was that they developed their own magnetic actuators that are a 10th of the cost (if you believe the marketing) of existing ones. I haven't verified any of those claims, but if true does mean their braille tablet could be an affordable reality.

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