Comments on: What if Amazon Kindle Did Braille for Blind People?

By: B H

B H — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:04:03 +0000

Just to add — I would think that a company like amazon could really change access to books by simply providing braille-format access to its downloadable database of books (which would be wonderful as more and more books are made into electronic format and could even narrow the gap for braille users, as currently only a tiny fraction of published books are also published in braille). I.e., provide an option to buy books in braille-ready format or in a format that can be converted to braille, so people can read them on existing braille displays. If they're concerned that such formats would be more easily pirated than their proprietary file formats, I'm sure a company like amazon could come up with some software solution to that (as they did with the print kindle files).

By: B H

B H — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:00:27 +0000

I'm not sure how this idea would be different from a conventional braille display (been around for a couple of decades)? or something like a braille notetaker (a portable PDA-like device with a braille display, used, among other things, for reading books in electronic format)? Is the 'new' idea to make the braille display more paper-like to the touch, or to use more lines per page? I think the main problem I've heard of with current portable braille display technology is cost. Google them and you'll find they're something like $5000 even for a relatively simple model that displays only one quite short line of text at a time. Perhaps partly just due the need for moving parts, but presumably also because the market is so so much smaller that the research effort put into advancing the technology just doesn't compare.