Cutting the Cost of E-Mail for the Blind

December 28, 2000

Cutting the Cost of E-Mail for the Blind

By ANNE EISENBERG

If 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."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
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