By: B H

B H — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:06:08 +0000

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.

By: B H

B H — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:57:18 +0000

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.

Comments on: bBook makes Braille easily portable

By: B H

By: B H