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Comment by sorressean | Hacker News Reader

While I love and applaud these contests as someone who should be better at reading braille, the article doesn't focus on a few key points. First it's not really the explosion of smartphones that has pushed braille literacy down, so much as it is the concept of having things read to you, in audio or via a screen reader. Laptops are pretty eubiquitous and thus it's much easier to port around a laptop and/or tablet than it is to lug around Braille Books. I remember my home room in grade school and into middle school would have volumes upon volumes of braille books just for individual subjects.

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Seems like there should be a market for a dynamic braille surface - something thin and light you could bring with your laptop that plugs into USB and has little dots that can mechanically (or magnetically) raise and lower whenever a pdf or webpage or whatever comes into focus.

I for one get frustrated listening to someone read at their pace and would much rather read at my own pace.

https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=braille+reader&tbm=shop

there are quite a lot of them to choose from

Is there not a market? Here's a list of several dozen devices that MacOS supports: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22491?locale=en_US

While its target release isn't till 2019, this looks promising (speaking from my visually-abled perspective, admittedly): https://dotincorp.com/about/entertainment/

I assume from your comment you haven't watched the movie 'Sneakers'. You should definitely check it out!

Braille displays have existed for well over a decade. (A brief look at patents suggests that the idea is half a century old). They usually use piezoelectric effects, according to Wikipedia.

The few blind people I've been acquainted with have all seemed to prefer screenreaders to braille displays. It's not hard to see why. You need to move one hand off the keyboard to read braille (keep in mind that blind users are almost invariably keyboard-centric users). The display is also very low information-density--you get 1 line of maybe 60, 70 characters. The information that gets piped into that display has to be set somehow--and invariably, it comes from screenreader information, which makes it hard to see any value-add benefits to a braille display.

It probably makes more sense to do a full on braille e-reader, particularly since physical braille books have to be much larger than regular books, and e-books already have a smaller problem space to actually implement. Looking around, I'm not the first to have this idea, but most of the products seem to be vaporware, for reasons that aren't clear to me (lack of funding?).

> The few blind people I've been acquainted with have all seemed to prefer screenreaders to braille displays. It's not hard to see why. You need to move one hand off the keyboard to read braille (keep in mind that blind users are almost invariably keyboard-centric users).

Ergonomics/UX factors, as appealing of an explanation as they make, may not be the main reason; the fact that the vast majority of the blind don't read Braille may be a bigger factor (Braille literacy among the blind seems to be about 10% in the US.)

For the people I knew who were blind, lack of knowledge of braille wasn't an issue in their case. After all, one did own (and bring to a conference!) a braille display, he just didn't use it most of the time.

I think a screen reader can be much faster than a dynamic braille surface. A voice running at 1.5x or 2x speed is pretty close to sighted reading speed, and totally intelligible once you get used to it. Plus, voice is hands-free.

A good friend of mine is a blind rehabilitation specialist. We've spent a lot of time discussing tech for the blind. We always run up against the same issues: The market is limited in total numbers, the blind tend to be under-employed or un-employed and therefore have limited $$ for technology widgets, and the market is fragmented.

Those who go blind later in life, like my friend and the Veteran's Hospital clients he works with, tend never to learn braille because there is just too much else of a higher priority in their rehab program and the ROI just isn't there. My aging uncle falls into that category, plus his severe gout in his fingers has pretty much destroyed his sense of touch.

A braille output surface is going to be expensive to build just about any way I can imaging tackling it (please, be more insightful than me and invent a cheap one), and there just aren't going to be a lot of takers.

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