http://gearcrave.com/2009-04-21/braille-e-book-concept-for-blind-bookworms/ Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:05:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://gearcrave.com/2009-04-21/braille-e-book-concept-for-blind-bookworms/comment-page-1/#comment-37015 B H Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:31:43 +0000 http://www.gearcrave.com/?p=14531#comment-37015 It isn’t clear to me what’s different or better about this device than existing portable braille notetaker devices (which are already widely used for reading books - in fact if anything it seems like portable electronic braille books have actually been widely used longer than print e-books?) Unless it’s quite substantially cheaper than the current multi-thousand dollar devices, in which case I imagine it could really revolutionalize things. If amazon decided to provide access to braille users, it wouldn’t need any new technical innovations, really—the thing that really comes to mind to me is simply file format—I would imagine amazon could drastically improve access to books just by providing an option on all the books it sells for download, for buyers to choose a braille-ready file format instead. It isn’t clear to me what’s different or better about this device than existing portable braille notetaker devices (which are already widely used for reading books – in fact if anything it seems like portable electronic braille books have actually been widely used longer than print e-books?) Unless it’s quite substantially cheaper than the current multi-thousand dollar devices, in which case I imagine it could really revolutionalize things. If amazon decided to provide access to braille users, it wouldn’t need any new technical innovations, really—the thing that really comes to mind to me is simply file format—I would imagine amazon could drastically improve access to books just by providing an option on all the books it sells for download, for buyers to choose a braille-ready file format instead.

]]>