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?

@nina_kali_nina I am optimistic that entry-level hearing aids will be solved for by colliding with the gigantic and hyper-competitive true wireless earbud market.

TWS eclipsed clinical hearing aids in ease of use and technology years ago, now Apple has legitimised hearing health in premium TWS, it's all poised to bust outrageous legacy business models wide open.

@nina_kali_nina

Hasn't played out quite as I expected yet (Jabra owned by world's biggest hearing aid co. exited Consumer, Sennheiser Consumer owned by 2nd biggest hearing aid co. not jumping in yet) but the pieces are there to make this a standard feature in millions of products sold widely across the world at a variety of accessible pricepoints.

As-is you can buy 3x pairs of AirPods Pro for the price of 1x set of hearing aids.

Will always be a place for specialists but the clock is ticking