Raised Braille-bumps on handset keypads are good for dialing a phone number and other simple tasks, but it can be a little more demanding to tap out text messages or do anything more complex by feel alone. To help the blind get more out of their mobile phones, Nobuyuki Sasaki, a former Tsukuba University of Technology professor, and his team have developed a new technology that converts the keypad key-presses into vibrating pulses (presumably correlated to the Braille alphabet).
The vibrations and key-press conversions are handled by an external terminal. When the user “pushes numbers on the keypad corresponding to Braille symbols, two terminals attached to the receiver’s phone vibrate at a specific rate to create a message.” The team’s next goal is to make the terminal smaller and more portable. Hopefully small enough to be a commercially viable solution for blind cellphone users.
[Via: Fareastgizmos]