National Braille Press president Brian Mac Donald told me last week that NBP's Center for Braille Innovation hopes to release an affordable, feature-rich braille note taker by year's end.
The device will have a 20-cell refreshable display, high-speed processor, 32 GBs of memory, Bluetooth, wi-fi, a camera for OCR scanning, and support Android apps.
Most significantly, if the B2G succeeds, institutions will be able to buy three for the cost of one HumanWare BrailleNote Apex ($6,379), the current industry standard pictured above.
This is great news for braille readers and a challenge to assistive technology providers. Engineering accessibility -- such as text-to-speech or voice recognition -- into mainstream products is increasingly common, but prices for adaptive solutions remain high.
Apple's iPhone includes basic features blind users would have paid extra for only a few years ago. Smart phones and tablets are changing expectations among the disabled about the price of accessibility.
A blind person shouldn't have to pay 10 times the price of the iPad2 just to communicate and surf the web. NBP hopes to bridge this price- and accessibility gap, which, when you think about it, is sublimly disproportionate.
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