Re: When is the last time anyone has read a braille book?
At magurp244: I think this article mentions that the standard design fell out of patent a while ago. I assume that the biggest competing companies are using roughly the same mechanism. It's the newer stuff with valves and springs and complex latching/slider schemes you need to watch out for, but I'm not sure how many--if any--of those are under patent.
I'm not sure what Aprone's design involved; what he let slip made it sound like it involved sliding actuators and multiple lines. He did say that he wound up getting a quote of $500 per unit, which was far more expensive than he was aiming for.
A lot of the stuff I've been reading suggests that maintenance is another serious issue; the dots need to be exposed to touch, which means they're exposed to grease and dirt and all sorts of contamination. What's more, repairing or replacing dam
aged or worn out components is complicated just because you're dealing with tiny parts in a crowded space, where millimeter precision might be an understatement.
(I wonder if a thin elastic sheet could be placed over it, and the dots could push/pull that? I can see that getting annoying, especially since it'd be better if the sheet was divided into sections for each dot, but it'd be hard to keep it from moving. Even if you wanted to glue the dots to their corresponding areas of the sheet (is that machine-doable? Are these made by machines, or is the market so small that they're all hand-made, and that's why they're so expensive? Or is the market so small that paying for the machines requires raising the price?)
The solution, of course, is to go back in time and install braille displays in 1990s cars, with one of those alphabet/number cards for all the people who would benefit from being able to read their gauges and clocks and things without
taking their eyes off the road. As a bonus, by 2010 they'd easily interface with cell phones, making texting and driving less inevitably deadly.
(One of these days, I'll come up with a solution that doesn't require riches or miracles. ... So a solution that doesn't require miracles.)
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