Towards displaying graphics on a cheap, large-scale braille display

Abstract

Large-scale Braille displays will make participation in modern media society easier for visually impaired people. At the moment extensive research is done on developing new technologies for affordable refreshable Braille displays. However, the developed displays often do not match the user requirements. This is because most of the engineers entrusted with the development know little to nothing about the potential users of their systems. To bridge that gap we carried out an online survey. Within this survey 69 people who either are visually impaired themselves or take care of someone who has lost his/her sight stated their opinion on how a large-scale refreshable Braille display should be designed. The results of this survey were used to build a first prototype of a large-scale refreshable braille display for displaying text and tactile graphics. This prototype relies on cheap, energy efficient microfluidic phase change actuators. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.