In case you think Braille is old tech from the paper books era, you should check out a modern refreshable Braille display connected to smartphone or laptop. They're feats of engineering that work hand in hand with screen readers to make content readable to blind and low vision people, and others who use them. The screen reader gets its data from the OS and apps and outputs that as either audio announcements, speech, or as Braille for a refreshable display. Single line displays are often 40 to 80 cells wide, each cell a little set of servo-controlled pins that pop up and down to form the Braille characters, but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters and others are multi-line slabs. Braille reading is a super power and more people should learn.

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vunderba 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. You can get an 2nd hand Orbit Reader for a couple hundred dollars if you search around. There's no substitute for a device which allows you to read the language as it was intended - tactically.

I personally use a Brailliant which has a 40-cell braille display. It's portable so you can load a bunch of BRF books on it and read on the go - and unlike other portable eReaders doesn't suffer from screen glare in the bright sun. :)

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tdeck 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters

Worth noting that this is because refreshable braille cells are really expensive to build, not because people necessarily want to be limited to such a short window of text. The Orbit Reader 20 (20 columns) is $800 and that's considered a "low cost" option.

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vunderba 2 days ago | parent [-]

There was a device called "Braille Me" announced some years ago, a 20-cell magnetically based reader which was intended to be a more affordable option, but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

https://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/technology/brailleme.html?from_se...

	▲	tdeck 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There's a lot of vaporware in Braille tech where people announce they can sell something for $X and then it either doesn't materialize at all or costs much more on release.

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acdha 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They’re really cool and some people depend on them but working on apps which rely on them has had me thinking about e-waste and cost. Some people have devices which are old but still perfectly functional except that they’re falling out of driver & security support, and many blind people don’t have tons of cash sitting around to replace them. I really hope that the tech industry finds a better model for things like that which are so important to everyday life.

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bell-cot 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I really hope that the tech industry finds a better model for things ...

Given the tech industry's failure to support things with 10X, 100X, 1000X, etc. the number of people affected, this seems unlikely.

Instead, could legislation ("when unsupported, it becomes open source", or whatever) be workable? Politicians might not want to be seen voting against blind people. OTOH, the situation is probably 100X more complex than I know of. And legal changes wouldn't magically give anyone the skills and budget and stuff to keep providing support.

	▲	acdha 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Fair, yes, I certainly agree that regulation needs to be a key part of this. In one case I was aware of, simply being able to rebuild an Android image after setting the flag to enable TLS >1.0 would’ve added years to the service life of some expensive hardware.