That is, until now. A South Korean start-up has developed Dot, the first affordable Braille smartwatch that allows the blind to read their texts and even e-books.
The World Health Organization estimates that there are 285 million people with severe visual impairment around the world, of whom 39 million are completely blind. Among them, literacy is a serious issue because access to Braille education and materials is limited. Even for the literate blind, reading is laborious – one Braille Bible comes in 40 volumes, for example – and remains largely limited to the printed word. Active Braille technology, which displays changing Braille text in real-time, typically cost up of US$3,000 and haven’t changed over the past decade.
Dot is a South Korean startup that believes the active Braille market is ripe for disruption. It has produced an active Braille smartwatch that’s a low-cost education and communication tool for the blind. With it, Dot hopes to return equal information access to a demographic that has been left in the age of real-time digital text.
How it works
To spell out words and numbers, 24 rounded magnetic metal pins embedded in the face of the slender, Fitbit Flex-reminiscent wristlets rhythmically move up and down. Users simply slide a finger across the four rows of the rounded pegs to tell the time, read texts, feel scheduled alarms and more. Using voice commands, they can prompt Dot to deliver messages from apps like iMessage from any Bluetooth-connected device.
Users can also customize the speed at which the mechanized display undulated, from one hertz to an incredibly brisk 100 hertz. Plus, with a battery life of 10 or so hours, the smartwatch can conveniently go up to five days before needing a recharge. One South Korean company is looking to change that. Eric Ju Yoon Kim, CEO and Co-founder of Dot, developed the Dot Smartwatch — a wearable that allows user to receive notifications from texts, emails, and social media, all in braille.
According to an article on Tech in Asia: “90% of blind people become blind after birth, and there’s nothing for them now — they lose their access to information so suddenly. Dot can be their lifeline, so they can learn Braille and access everyday information through their fingers, which is the goal of Braille literacy,” said Kim.
With an anticipated price under $300, the Dot smartwatch is a good first step in introducing wearable technology to an under-served group of people. But it’s also a perfect example of how much further we need to go. Here’s how the watch functions: A set of dull pins rise and fall, showing four characters at a time. While users can set the refresh speed to be faster or slower, reading four letters of notification, bit by bit, is a pretty poor user experience. Think about it; it would take a mighty 35 refreshes to read a single 140 character tweet. Less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind
Americans can actually read braille. Kim hopes that this will inspire the legally blind to learn braille, since his website claims that the watch is targeted to new braille learners.
Currently, there are two popular forms of watches for the blind: a circular interfaced watch or a smart device with audio controls. Whether or not Dot is successful is beside the point, because the simple presence of the company is going to show a market desire for these products that could finally bring technology to the millions of people who are blind. So Dot may not revolutionize the way blind people process information, but it will, however, finally start a conversation surrounding the lack of technology for the visually impaired.
The Dot smartwatch appears, at first glance, like one of the many screen-less wearables on the market already. You might mistake it for a white Fitbit from its telltale bulge where the hardware module rests atop the wearer’s wrist. That module houses four “cells” of six active dots each – enough for four Braille characters to be displayed at once.
The device can be calibrated to display new characters at speeds ranging from a glacial 1 hertz to a breakneck 100 hertz; development has yielded a battery life of 10 hours, which will give average users five days between charges, Dot says.
The device is based on haptic technology, which provides feedback or information in real-time through touch. By linking to any Bluetooth device, the Dot smartwatch can pull text from applications like iMessage using voice commands. Co-founder and CEO Eric Ju Yoon Kim says that Dot gives users the chance to read text their own way.
“Until now, if you got a message on iOS from your girlfriend, for example, you had to listen to Siri read it to you in that voice, which is impersonal,” Kim explains. “Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself and hear your girlfriend’s voice saying it in your head?” As a wearable, Dot is still without competition. Current industry leaders produce hardware in the form of keyboards with active Braille cells that connect to computers via USB, with price tags in the thousands of dollars.
Kim tells Tech in Asia that when the Dot smartwatch goes on sale in the United States this December, it will retail for less than US$300.
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