Touch-screen technology will now be available to the visually challenged thanks to an invention by Jussi Rantala of the University of Tampere in Finland and her colleagues. They have created have created a vibrating touch screen phone that can simulate Braille.
This was done by using a cellphone which has a piezoelectric material built into the touch screen that vibrates when an electric signal is applied to it. In Braille, letters are encoded using a two-by-three matrix in which each character is represented by a different configuration of raised and absent dots. On the touch screen, a raised dot is represented by a single pulse of intense vibration, and an absent dot by a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses.
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Source: Times Of India
