>This article runs in Thursday's N Y Times technology/circuits section.
>Let's hope that these affordable displays actually turn out to work well
>and get priced so more of us can afford them.
>
>Will
>wilsmith@iglou.com
>
>
>Cutting the Cost of E-Mail for the Blind
>
>By ANNE EISENBERG
>
> I f blind people have the money, and they will need quite a bit of it,
> they can buy a computer attachment that translates text on their
> monitors into Braille.
>
> Dr. Judith M. Dixon, who works at the Library of Congress on issues
> affecting the blind and physically handicapped, uses such a machine,
> running her fingers over the Braille dots that it produces to check
> e-mail messages, online headlines and other electronic documents.
>
> Dr. Dixon wants other blind people to have the same access, she said,
> but the cost of the machine that translates the text is a problem.
>
> "My machine cost $12,000," she said. That price is too high for most
> blind people and their employers, she said.
>
> But an engineer who heard Dr. Dixon discuss Braille displays at a
> conference several years ago may have come up with a solution, a
> display that may one day be much more affordable than current
> technology, which costs $3,000 to $12,000.
>
> The engineer, John W. Roberts, who works at the National Institute of
> Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., has has come up with an
> unconventional solution. With Braille, Mr. Roberts said, the hand
> usually has to move, not the material. But he decided to go the
> opposite way, making the material move while the hand remains still.
>
> He devised a display that has the Braille on the rim of a wheel about
> the size of a roll of masking tape. The wheel is full of holes with
> pins running in tracks beneath the holes. As the wheel spins, the pins
> pop out to make the raised Braille letters, which move under the
> user's stationary hand.
>
> "I was trying to avoid the main reason for the cost in a traditional
> Braille display," Mr. Roberts said. Ordinary Braille displays are
> expensive because each pin that moves up and down to create part of a
> Braille character must have a power device or actuator to move it.
>
> The Braille wheel that Mr. Roberts created replaces these hundreds of
> actuators with three electromagnets, one for each dot on the three-dot
> Braille column. Braille characters are made up of two parallel columns
> of three dots or two parallel columns of four dots, depending on the
> system.
>
> As the wheel turns in Mr. Roberts's machine, the three actuators push
> or pull the three pins through the holes to make a column of dots.
> Then the actuators go on to the next column. Each column stays in
> position until it is reset by the electromagnets after the wheel makes
> a complete turn.
>
> In this way, the three electromagnets set up the Braille characters.
> And instead of having someone run a hand left to right over the
> display, the display moves right to left under the stationary hand,
> creating the sensation of reading left to right. The display's
> movement is driven by a motor.
>
> "The idea was so improbable," Mr. Roberts said, "that we had to build
> a prototype before anyone would believe it could work."
>
> Mr. Roberts and his team have spent two years building and refining
> the rotating Braille wheel. They stocked it with an electronic copy of
> "The Wizard of Oz" (which, because it is in the public domain, was
> available at no cost, Mr. Roberts said), and invited blind people to
> try it. Then they revised the design based on users' comments.
>
> In the most recent tests, the device produced 300 characters per
> minute, a slow to moderate reading rate for Braille.
>
> "There's no fundamental limit on how fast it can go," Mr. Roberts
> said. "It can run as fast as anyone can read."
>
> Curtis Chong, director of technology at the National Federation of the
> Blind, an advocacy group in Baltimore, said he thought the display had
> potential.
>
> "I started off saying this was something that would never work," Mr.
> Chong said. But he said he had changed his view after trying the
> second-generation prototype.
>
> "I read 20 to 30 words a minute with no trouble," he said.
>
> The machine is ideal, Mr. Chong said, for information that is received
> serially, as in a novel. But the machine does not lend itself to
> material that also needs to be scanned vertically, like tables,
> spreadsheets or other displays of data where the viewer moves up and
> down as well as across.
>
> But another Braille display being developed may meet this need.
>
> At Orbital Research in Cleveland, staff members are working on a
> display that can show multiple lines of Braille but should also be
> affordable. Ordinary Braille displays show only one line, or a
> fraction of it, because of the expense of actuating the characters.
>
> The Orbital Research machine, which is not yet in prototype, uses
> electromechanical microvalves to run the display. The microvalves use
> air to inflate a polymer coating into Braille dots.
>
> Dr. Frederick J. Lisy, a vice president at Orbital Research, said,
> "These microvalves have been expensive to develop but will be very
> cheap to produce."
>
> Dr. Lawrence A. Scadden, a senior program director at the National
> Science Foundation, which is financing the Orbital Research project,
> said the cost of the machine should be only a tenth of the cost of
> current displays.
>
> "On most commercial devices, every dot costs anywhere from several
> dollars to $10," Dr. Scadden said. "We are looking at alternative
> technologies because the majority of blind people can't afford this."
>
> Many blind people use screen-reader software to translate text on a
> computer screen into synthetic speech. But such programs are less
> precise than Braille displays.
>
> "Synthetic speech is particularly poor for proper names and homonyms,"
> Dr. Dixon said. "And you don't get spelling, punctuation, structure or
> literary style."
>
> She said she hoped that companies would be interested in manufacturing
> Mr. Roberts's prototype. "So far Roberts's machine isn't a product,
> but an idea," Dr. Dixon said. "But if Braille can be made efficient at
> a low price, then it's a good idea indeed."
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