Braille Phone

The visually impaired are rejoicing: scientists from Finland have designed and developed a Braille-ready touch-screen phone.

The scientists used a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has a piezoelectric material built into the touch screen that vibrates when an electric signal is applied to it. They installed a software that represents a raised dot as a single pulse of intense vibration, and an absent dot as a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses. In one of their tests, the user simply placed a finger anywhere on the screen and held it still. The phone then displayed a character by vibrating the sequence of six dots, ach 360 milliseconds apart. After getting used to it, the volunteers were able to read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds. The team's next step will be to present entire words and sentences. Screen-reading software is already available that "grabs" information displayed as text and turns it into speech. The same information could be turned into Braille characters on phones with vibrating touch screens.

Acknowledgement: The New Scientist [http://www.newscientist.com/] has kindly given permission to reuse the above information from their website.

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