bBook makes Braille easily portable
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Friday, April 28, 2006 by T.O. Whenham
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I’ve never needed to read Braille and hopefully I never will. For those who do, though, the new bBook (short, obviously, for Braille book) seems like a great idea. It has a bunch of dots on the front of it that can raise and lower as needed to show the correct words. That means you can download and read eBooks on a simple, portable device. Audio books are another existing solution, but it seems like this would be a faster and more pleasing option for some, in much the same way that reading a book is nicer than listening to one many times. The unit looks to be somewhere between a PDA and a small notebook in size, so it is easily portable.
The unit is equipped with Bluetooth for easy transfer of books. It can work with Linux, Windows or MacOS X. It has rechargeable batteries for power. No word on price or availability.
If the picture shown is accurate (many lines of text), I would think it would be prohibitively expensive unless there is some fundamentally new technology proposed? The idea of reading braille-formatted books in electronic form via a refreshable braille display is not new and has been commonly used for a few years at least (e.g. braille notetakers, something like a PDA with a braille display and sometimes a braille-specific keyboard) — the two remaining weaknesses from what I read seem to be 1) cost — a simple internet search will show you that even a simple device with a one-line display (20 or 40 characters at a time) currently costs a couple of thousand dollars, and 2) access to files — many publishers are not willing to sell electronic formats of their books even if the file will only be used to convert to braille format (depends on the country too, as some countries have laws requiring publishers to make such things available to braille readers). Even the new electronic books from amazon are in a special encoded file format that as far as I know can't be readily be displayed on a braille display and isn't compatible with braille-conversion software.
The importance of such an idea goes far beyond the fact that reading a book is often nicer than listening to one… Literacy among blind people has actually gone down quite drastically in the last generation and blind children are increasingly often being given audio-recordings when their classmates are given a book to read, despite the fact that literacy is very strongly linked to future success, achievement and employment, in blind people as much as or even more than in sighted. Cheap and widely available braille reading material is of enormous importance to blind people, and especially to blind children. In order to learn to read and write fluently and well you need to read a lot.