Tech Ticker

There have been few phones doing text to speech for visually impaired users but a touchscreen phone for blind will be the first. Researchers at the University of Tampere in Finland have taken a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet device which is equipped with piezoelectric material built in the touchscreen and installed a software that mimics Braille’s raised dots and absent dots for recognizing alphabets (raised dot is represented by a single pulse of intense vibration while an absent dot is denoted by a longer vibration).

The result? Reading Braille on a flat surface is difficult but when the users got accustomed with the software’s interface, they could read a character in under 1.5secs. Impressive.

[Via Wired]