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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]
About The Author
Will Park
Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of what the world should be but knows that the world is not perfect. Can we ever hope to see Will's dream become reality? We'll see...
