Refreshable braille display
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A refreshable braille display or braille terminal is an electro-mechanical device for displaying braille characters, usually by means of round-tipped pins raised through holes in a flat surface. Visually impaired computer users who cannot use a standard computer monitor can use it to read text output. Deafblind computer users may also use refreshable braille displays.
Mechanical details
The base of a refreshable braille display often integrates a pure braille keyboard. Similar to the
The mechanism which raises the dots uses the
Because of the complexity of producing a reliable display that will cope with daily wear and tear, these displays are expensive. Usually, only 40 or 80
On some models the position of the
Software
The software gathers the content of the screen from the operating system, converts it into braille characters and sends it to the display.
Screen readers for graphical operating systems are especially complex, because graphical elements like windows or slidebars have to be interpreted and described in text form. Modern operating systems usually have an
Rotation-wheel Braille display
A rotating-wheel Braille display was developed in 2000 by the
Braille e-book
See also
- GNOME accessibility
- VoiceOver
- Tactile project at MIT
References
External links
- NIST: Converting Digital Information to Braille at the Wayback Machine (archived December 31, 2009)
- Information on Bi-directional Refreshable Tactile Display US Patent 6,692,255