Researchers develop braille for vibrating touchscreen devices
Braille
To discover how visually impaired volunteers would prefer to receive these vibrations, the team developed two different presentation methods. In the first, the user touches the screen on the left-hand side to read whether or not there is a bump in that position of the matrix, then moves their finger horizontally across the screen to read the remaining five dots. “But it wasn’t that easy to read,” says Rantala.
In the second method, the user simply places a finger anywhere on the screen and holds it still. The phone then displays a character by vibrating the sequence of six dots, each 360 milliseconds apart. “It took some time for them to start reading, because this representation is totally different from anything else that they had previously used,” says Rantala. But once the volunteers were used to it, they were able to speed it up and read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds.
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