Re: [UACCESS-L] FW: Disabled students can't work within demands of FCAT

[Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>]

Lisa Yayla writes:
 > Hi,
 > You wrote about one graphic display.
 > You might be interested in this article about another
 > a Rotating-Wheel Based  Refreshable Braille Display
 > by NIST.  It apparently will not be very expensive.
 > The link to the article is
 >  http://www.itl.nist.gov/div895/isis/projects/brailleproject.html 

Yes, this was announced late last year. The only disadvantage, and I
may be wrong as the details weren't clear, is that it can't display
braille text, only graphics. I am not sure why this is so - perhaps
the refresh rate isn't fast enough to be useful for textual work.

The ultimate challenge is to create a full-page text/graphic display
such as that in Stuttgart, but at a much lower cost. Still, any
advance at all in this area is to be welcomed, and the research ought
to be encouraged. I am hoping to attend the CSUN conference in the
U.S. again this year, so if NIST decide to bring along one of their
prototype devices, I might have a chance to try it.

Also if you search the U.S. patent data base for inventions related to
tactile displays you will find quite a number of entries (my reason for
mentioning the U.S. data base is that it is freely available on the
Web, and the inventors of new technologies, wherever they may be
located, usually seek to extend their patents to the U.S. in any
case). Few of these inventions have ever been developed into publicly
available products. One interesting exception is the braille display
technology developed by Robotron here in Australia, which is said to
be less expensive than conventional arrays of piezoelectric cells,
while also reducing power requirements. So far, the only application
has been in a scientific calculator, which I haven't had a chance to
examine. I don't know whether there are any plans to integrate the
technology into larger displays (e.g., a 40-cell display suitable as
an interface to a computer).