BrailleRing: The shortest long braille-display in the world – A review of the state-of-the-art and a new approach

Abstract

After paying tribute to the ground-breaking invention of the tactile alphabet by Louis Braille, the paper describes the technological development of so-called refreshable Braille-Displays in significant steps from the late 1970s up till now. Despite quite many R&D efforts over these 40 years, all Braille-Displays presently available on the market in principle follow the same construction scheme as disclosed by Tetzlaff in 1981: Piezo-electric benders which move small pins up- and down [1]. In order to overcome several drawbacks of the classical solutions, we propose and investigate a radically new approach, where different combinations of rigid tactile points are placed on the surfaces of rotating cuboids which are arranged inside of a rotating cylinder. The lower half of the cylinder resembles the reading area for the finger, whereas a group of a few actuators by rotating said cuboids produces new text-content in the upper half. This can result not only in a complete new way of mobile and reasonably priced Braille reading equipment but also in a revival of Braille worldwide.