Nina KalininaFeb 2

I'm yet again reminded that accessibility technologies are priced unfairly. Did you know that a pair of hearing aids starts at roughly £500 but an average model can easily cost over £1500? And it's not like it's rocket science.
Similarly, Braille displays start at £1500, but can easily cost over £5000.
Similarly, the most popular and one of the most affordable Braille printers costs almost £3000.

Something can be said about special design requirements for such devices, or about the fact that there is no demand to make them at the scale that would allow to cut the costs ten times. And I can't even say that a high price is an excuse; if you'd try to build a Braille embosser that can operate at practical speeds with decent reliability using off the shelf components, you are likely to spend more money on it than you'd spend getting a commercial solution, even without R&D costs.

So, uh, folks, we can do better. I can't be the only one who keeps thinking about making such technologies cheaper, right?

Show threadLee Holmes 

@nina_kali_nina I feel like every 2 years there's some article saying how some new university project found a way to make braille displays 10x cheaper.

So far the only thing I've found that makes these cheaper is buying them used on ebay.

Feb 2 at 2:18amWeb
Show threadNina KalininaFeb 2
@Lee_Holmes to be honest, I wouldn't be relying on academia alone. There are many interesting ideas that make for a great research project or a fun paper, but very few of them pass the test of time or get picked up by manufacturers. :(
Show threadLee Holmes Feb 2
@nina_kali_nina 100%. It all comes down to the price of piezios for the cells. They're just expensive. I've seen ideas of belt drive cell combinations, and they're just too complicated to do at scale.
Show threadNina KalininaFeb 2

@Lee_Holmes I've been entertaining the idea of Braille displays on ferofluids since 2011, but my uni didn't have a budget for that. There was a paper from 2021 that shows that it's theoretically possible, so I think it might be worth trying to replicate in private. If it works, there will be very few moving parts, and the assembly shouldn't have any small parts whatsoever. The biggest challenge is the manufacturing of the closed ferofluid cells; ones I can think of either will need to be replaced often due to low durability or would be hard to make and operate.

Perhaps I should bite the bullet and experiment with it. The benefit of such cell displays is that they can be made fairly dense and shouldn't cost much, so it should be possible to make more than just one line of text, but also draw lines, render tables, or potentially even some sort of diagrams or charts maybe.