Well I hope that this stuff comes soon.
A brailled apple device, windows phone or tablet or android device
would just be plain nerdy and with speech to.
all we need is tactile pictures on devices and we would be set.
At 11:44 a.m. 7/08/2012 +0100, you wrote:
Hi Tom.
Up until recently I would've fully agreed with you that despite
advances in computer technology, the instant access braille provides
for lables and other bits of information is absolutely
irriplaceable. However, the penfriend has largely for me replaced
the function braille used to perform, sinse all I need to do is
stick a sticker on something, touch the penfriend to it hit record
and speak, which is actually far easier than writing, cutting and
correctly sticking a braille lable on something, and in terms of
cost, the penfriend machine itself cost less than a brailler and
it's lables are less expensive. It also takes far less time and can
be done with a none braillist, indeed I paid my research assistant
for an hour's work and got my entire unlabled dvd and cd collections
done, ---- including all 7 seasons of star trek voyager and several
rather large box sets.
Undoubtedly, the penfriend labeling system isn't perfect. You can't
for instance avoid it speaking out the lable it reads, which would
make playing cards with it say pretty difficult, but I'm fairly
certain a version with headphones is just around the corner, also a
version with different levels of tactile labeling so that you could
mark squares on a board for basic layout and use the penfriend for
specific square reading.
of course, if braille technology can catch up, then this situation
might change. For instance, the current braille display designs of
about a line of text represented by motorized pins are pretty much
the same as they were when first developed in the mid nineties. A
few years ago however, I did discuss with several engineers of
specialist tech (it was at the Uk vi tech sexhibition site village),
the possibility of the developement of a plastic which would tense
when an electric current ran through it.
A sheet of this could be used with correct internal programming to
create an A 4 sized tactile display comparatively cheaply. under
those! circumstances, with large, relatively cheap displays able to
show an a full screen of infomation in tactile form i could see
braille very muh making a come back, sinse then any and all spacial
information woule equally available to a vi computer user, and in a
far more efficient method than with a screen reader.
Imagine playing chess on a computer with a real tactile board, or
better still, having a game like time of conflict where you could
run your hands over aa dynamic map overview and read the identity of
labled units as they moved around.
That sort of developement would be a total change, and not just in
games, sinse graphs, tables, pie charts, tree diagrams and other
forms of spacial representative data would be just as accessible to
a vlind user, which would have great applications for business,
science, and goodness knows what else.
Failing this sort of developement in technology though, I can see
braille being made completely obsolete in the next 20 years or so,
sinse with the rise of scanning and coding technology like the
penfriend, even it's essentially fast labeling functions will soon
be things which can be done far more easily via electronics.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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