refreshable braille displays
Some of my colleagues use screen readers with braille display output. I’d never come across this particular form of access tech and it wasn’t immediately obvious why the braille displays are necessary…or indeed how they worked. They look a bit space-age, or rather 1960s Sci-Fi movies idea of space age.
According to Wikipedia:
“The mechanism which raises the dots uses the piezo effect of some crystals, where they expand when a voltage is applied to them. Such a crystal is connected to a lever, which in turn raises the dot. There has to be a crystal for each dot of the display, i.e. eight per character.”
An RNIB training video made the why clear. The braille output is often used in combination with speech output and it is particularly useful for punctuation, spelling and codes. These can’t be easily heard in the speech output, at least not without seriously compromising your ability to listen to the speech comfortably. You can ask the screenreader to speak all the punctuation and spell out words but you wouldn’t always want it to be doing that. And the braille display is much more like reading, as opposed to listening which could make it easier for precision work and for remembering. The video featured a computer programmer explaining how valuable the braille display is for her when reading computer code.
They’re not cheap though. The Braille display available from the RNIB shop is £1,195.00 (Ex. VAT).