Seeking the 'holy Braille' display: might electromechanically active polymers be the solution?

摘要

For over 50 years, there have been many attempts to develop paperless Braille displays that would provide readers with visual impairments access to digital information. Such devices are conceived as electronically refreshable tactile displays allowing users to read dynamically presented Braille text. The displays are designed as arrays of Braille cells, corresponding to the individual characters of the Braille code. The emerging world standard for refreshable Braille displays utilizes eight dots, arranged in two columns of four dots each. The height of each dot with respect to the reading surface must be individually controllable, so as to produce two states: dot raised and dot lowered. This allows for representing 256 different combinations — that is, 256 different Braille characters.