Hi All,

Someone posted this article about an effort at a multiline braille 
display to another list. Link and article are below my closing.

Ciao

http://www.engin.umich.edu/college/about/news/stories/2015/december/bringing-braille-back-with-a-better-display-technology

Bringing Braille back with better display technology
12/24/2015

From: Nicole Casal Moore

Michigan Engineering

Today, blind people fluent in Braille can read computer screens through 
refreshable mechanical displays that convert the words to raised dots – 
but only
one line at a time.

For the sighted, imagine a Kindle that showed just 40 characters per 
page, says Sile O’Modhrain, an associate professor in the University of 
Michigan School
of Music, Theatre and Dance and the School of Information, who is blind. 
Forty characters amounts to about 10 words.

The process is cumbersome. It doesn’t give context. It’s expensive. And 
O’Modhrain believes it’s one of the factors contributing to Braille’s 
declining
use. Even though fluency in the nearly 200-year-old code is linked with 
higher employment and academic performance for the visually impaired, 
fewer blind
people are learning and using it. Taking Braille’s place are 
text-to-speech programs that make it easier and faster to consume 
electronic information,
but at the same time, hold back literacy.

So O’Modhrain has teamed up with engineering researchers to build a 
better Braille display – one that could show the equivalent of a whole 
tablet screen
at once. In addition, it could translate beyond text, rendering graphs, 
charts, maps and complicated equations in a medium the blind could 
understand with
their fingertips.

“What we’re trying to build in this project is full-page tactile screen 
for something like a Kindle or an iPad where you could just display 
refreshable
text in real time,” O’Modhrain said. “Relative to what’s done today and 
how that’s done, it’s a complete paradigm shift.”

In the 1950s, about half of blind children learned to read Braille, 
according to the National Federation of the Blind. Today, that number is 
just 10 percent.
Yet 80 percent of blind people who are employed know Braille. Those 
numbers don’t tell the whole story, as definitions and health outcomes 
have evolved
over the years. But the trend they suggest is real, the researchers say.

“When you’re learning to read and write, it’s hard to find a substitute 
for physically encountering text – whether it’s in visual or tactile 
form,” O’Modhrain
said. ”There are many studies that show that listening to something is 
not the same as reading it.”

The system she is developing with Brent Gillespie, an associate 
professor of mechanical engineering, and Alex Russomanno, a doctoral 
student in the same
department, would make e-reading for the blind more efficient and a lot 
less expensive. Today, a commercial one-line Braille display costs 
around $5,000.
If you were to directly scale up the mechanism behind it to show a whole 
page, it would cost around $50,000, Russomanno says. The U-M 
researchers’ aim
to offer that capability at just $1,000 per device.

How can they make a bigger display at a fraction of the cost? They 
believe the answer is microfluidics – a branch of engineering centered 
on tiny chips
with channels that guide the flow of liquid or air. In many ways, 
microfluidic chips resemble the integrated circuits of computers.

“We use the equivalent of electronic logic and circuitry,” Russomanno 
said. “When I say that, I’m referring to the way a computer works, with 
transistors
and resistors. Except our circuit is not electronic at all. It’s 
fluidic. Instead of high voltage and low voltage you have high pressure 
and low pressure,
and instead of electric current flow you have fluid flow and you can 
achieve the same basic logic features.”

Like the 0s and 1s that undergird computing, Braille is a binary code. 
Each Braille cell, which is sometimes a letter and sometimes a whole 
word, contains
six dots that can either be raised or flat to convey different information.

“The dots are either there or they’re not,” O’Modhrain said. “That’s why 
this circuit is so elegant.”

Play Video
Michigan engineers have developed technology that may soon lead to a 
refreshable braille tablet the size of a Kindle.

Their system uses air to move bubbles of pressurized air that raise or 
lower the Braille dots. And whereas other approaches require a dedicated 
information
channel for each dot, theirs can control a long string of dots with just 
two input valves. The length of the dot string is limited only by the 
time it
takes the information (high or low pressure/raised or lowered dot) to 
get to its end point.

There’s also overlap in the manufacturing processes of electronic and 
fluidic circuits. Microchips are made all at once, rather than 
transistor-by-transistor.
In the same way, the researchers can mold as many Braille dots as they 
like with one batch process. They say this will be key to economically 
making a
full-page display.

Right now they’re working on shrinking their fluidic circuits to fit 
under Braille dots, which would be smaller than a peppercorn. They 
envision a system
where up to 10,000 dots are powered by 10,000 microfluidic chips.

"We would like to think a device like this would make reading electronic 
Braille more attractive again, make it close to the experience of 
reading a traditional
book," O'Modhrain said. "Another challenge is convincing educational 
authorities to teach Braille again. It has dropped out of the system in 
terms of the
education of blind people and we think it’s important to bring Braille 
back."


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