gizmag.com — The innovative Touch Messenger enables the visually impaired users to send and receive Braille text messages. The 3-4 button on the cell phone is used as two Braille keypads and text messages can be checked through the Braille display screen in the lower part.
Jul 17, 2006 View in Crawl 4
procdaddyJul 17, 2006
I know this may be wrong...butDid you know Hellen Keller had a horse?Neither did she!:/ now I'm gonna go burn in hell a digg comment.
chrisharrisJul 17, 2006
Its actually quite difficult / expensive to manufacture a device where the braille dots can rise and fall, and have the required dot density to be felt easily. This is why many blind users on the web listen to the sites with screen readers, since braille strips (as this device appears to have) are prohibitively expensive.
pauldonnellyJul 17, 2006
They consist of a strip of six-pin cells. The pins raise and lower to form Braille characters.
luanialusJul 17, 2006
@chrisharris Indeed, very expensive, the alva which is a refreshable braille display for the computer costs something like 4000 bucks. Also reading braille is much slower than listening to the content.
merrebornJul 17, 2006
Speach to text is a hard problem. And a cellphone's certainly not got enough processing power for it, which means you'd have to actually call up a service to compose your text message, which would kind of defeat the purpose, wouldn't it?Text messaging saves wireless minutes, and it's less intrusive than a phone call.
cowgurlbAug 9, 2006
you are all talking about people who are blind, so why dont they just listen to messages. you have forgotten that there are still a large amount of people who are both Deaf and Blind, who still need a way to communicate.this device is an amazing godsend. Deaf/Blind people have had a device similar to the old TTY system that deaf people have used, where instead of a cpu spits out a ticker tape with the message iin braille,but it isn;t mobile, and the technology (i have heard) is a bit old.
kenniOct 9, 2006
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gezzNov 18, 2006
hello there! im actually interested on these stuffs and right now im makin a project for visually impared person. it is actually a small interface form a braille system to a cell phone. its just is there somone who could help me here? i would like to know what type of microprocessor must be used, also the format of text msgs from cellphones, are they PDU format?. lastly what is the best phone that can be used to integrate a braille system, is it nokia? SE? samsung? etc. im actually a student having this project. i hope someone outthere could help me or give me some leads. thanks to your help in advance, also if you have some infos kindly email me @ spopo_vich@yahoo.com.. thanks!