Braille E-book Concept Design

[orwell2k]

How cool is that! What great news. It really is amazing some of the technology applications that really help people. Sure, we all love our eReaders and iPhones, but we survived for years without them and whilst they "help" us, they're not truly needed. But this kind of application really helps people who need it. I hope they get some good effort going to start translating more books into Braille.

Kudos!

[Seabound]

That is really, really neat. For the sake of many, I wish them success!

[CathalMagus]

I have no visual impairment, but I'd love to get one of these and learn braille anyway. That way, if I started losing my sight in 50 years, I wouldn't have to let up in my reading :^) Plus, all the low-light-condition situations for which I'd no longer need a reading light...

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by CathalMagus

I have no visual impairment, but I'd love to get one of these and learn braille anyway. That way, if I started losing my sight in 50 years, I wouldn't have to let up in my reading :^) Plus, all the low-light-condition situations for which I'd no longer need a reading light...

actually i feel the same way. they look like amazing gadgets. i'm not sure how they work but i imagine they could probably translate any text document, which would mean vastly improved accessibility to lots of things for blind people.

i'd love to get one and try to learn braille and i also sort of wish i could get one for my grandmother... she's losing her vision but for now she just uses audio books. she can still see a little bit, enough to do quite a lot of things but not read (or drive). but to be honest i doubt she would want to learn braille (she really likes those audio books), and she hates gadgets... i've tried on several occasions to buy her an answering machine and she scoffs at me, "if people want to talk to me they can call back." and i wanted to buy her a cd player so she could get audio books from the library (she just has a cassette player which reads special cassettes, apparently they have 4 sides... don't ask me how that's possible, i have no idea) but she shouts "no ! none of those blasted gadgets !!"

[Jellby]

With a little bit more resolution they could combine raised dots with black dots and be used for both Braille and "normal" text, and they could even "display" relief pictures... Hmm, wishful thinking

[Fledchen]

The cassettes with 4 "sides" are actually just regular cassettes recorded to work with specialized players. On a regular commercial cassette, there are two tracks for each side, one for the left speaker and one for the right. This is nice for music, but not really necessary for an audio book, so each track on the tape is a different part of the recording. After the first side of the tape, you flip it over as you would normally, but after the second side, you flip it over to the first side and then flip a toggle switch on the player to get to the third "side" of the cassette. They are also usually recorded to play back at 15/16 ips (a regular commercial cassette is 1 7/8 ips.) The National Library Service in the U.S. uses tapes that would hold 90 minutes of audio if they were used in the normal manner, but hold 6 hours in the specialized format.
Unfortunately, because cassettes are on their way out, it's becoming prohibitively expensive to get blank media and replacement parts for cassette players, so the U.S. is switching to digital audio books that will be distributed (with DRM) on cassette-sized flash cartridges and downloadable from the NLS-BARD web site. I have been fortunate to be able to participate in the beta testing of the digital books, and they are wonderful (except for the DRM that is required under the copyright law provisions that allow the program to exist).

[Fledchen]

Originally Posted by CathalMagus

I have no visual impairment, but I'd love to get one of these and learn braille anyway. That way, if I started losing my sight in 50 years, I wouldn't have to let up in my reading :^) Plus, all the low-light-condition situations for which I'd no longer need a reading light...

Free braille lessons: http://brl.org
Note that this site teaches North American Literary Braille, which is slightly different from the braille code that is used in the UK and Ireland. UK/Irish braille does not have capital letters and they use different punctuation symbols.

[mjdb]

Originally Posted by Alisa

Sorry if I miss this being posted. I haven't seen it yet, but Gizmodo is showing a Braille Ebook Reader concept made by Seon-Keun Park, Byung-Min Woo, Sun-Hye Woo & Jin-Sun Park using an "electroactive polymer". Exciting stuff.

This looks and sounds like a wonderful device, BUT it is described as a concept rather than a prototype.

Perphaps I am misunderstanding, but to me concept has the impliation of a non-working model of something that they would like to build if the hardware existed.

Does this sort of "electroactive polymer" display containing hundreds of individual actuators actually exist, even just in an laboratory setting ?

I note that the Wikipedia entry for "electroactive polymer" is only a stub
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroactive_polymers
and mentions "artificial muscles" and "application in the field of robotics".

[JasonB]

Originally Posted by Fledchen

Note that this site teaches North American Literary Braille, which is slightly different from the braille code that is used in the UK and Ireland. UK/Irish braille does not have capital letters and they use different punctuation symbols.

If this were implemented into an electronic reader, I'm sure that it would be a simple matter to have different "languages" that that would have it display the different types of braille - so you wouldn't have to buy a different reader for each.

(That is, if the data itself can be encoded in a version-agnostic format, leaving it up to the device to interpret how it's presented...I imaging that this would be the same type of thing as just changing "fonts" for regular text.)