A refreshable braille display or braille terminal is an electro-mechanical device for displaying braille characters, usually by means of round-tipped pins raised through holes in a flat surface. Visually impairedcomputer users who cannot use a computer monitor can use it to read text output. Deafblindcomputer users may also use refreshable braille displays. Speech synthesizers are also commonly used for the same task, and a blind user may switch between the two systems or use both at the same time depending on circumstances.
Mechanical details
The base of a refreshable braille display often integrates a pure braille keyboard. Similar to the Perkins Brailler, the input is performed by two sets of four keys on each side, while output is via a refreshable braille display consisting of a row of electro-mechanical character cells, each of which can raise or lower a combination of eight round-tipped pins. Other variants exist that use a conventional QWERTY keyboard for input and braille pins for output, as well as input-only and output-only devices. The mechanism which raises the dots uses the piezo effect of some crystals, whereby 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. Because of the complexity of producing a reliable display that will cope with daily wear and tear, these displays are expensive. Usually, only 40 or 80 braille cells are displayed. Models with between 18 and 40 cells exist in some notetaker devices. On some models the position of the cursor is represented by vibrating the dots, and some models have a switch associated with each cell to move the cursor to that cell directly.
A rotating-wheel Braille display was developed in 2000 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and another at the Leuven University in Belgium. Both wheels are still in the process of commercialization. In these units, braille dots are put on the edge of a spinning wheel, which allows the user to read continuously with a stationary finger while the wheel spins at a selected speed. The braille dots are set in a simple scanning-style fashion as the dots on the wheel spin past a stationary actuator that sets the braille characters. As a result, manufacturing complexity is greatly reduced and rotating-wheel braille displays, when in actual production, should be less expensive than traditional braille displays.
