Braille phone is a universal cellular phone concept that is able to produce Braille code in a particular part of it by using Electric Active Plastic to make it usable for visually handicapped people. The phone has been designed in a simple and easy to use manner and looks like a television remote control. The Braille area provides all the information that a traditional screen of a cell phone displays so that visually impaired people can read them by touching it. It provides letter blocks in two by three dot matrixes and by using this principle on buttons, visually challenged people can easily create or read text messages. This braille phone just won Red Dot Awards 2009.
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One of Next-Gen PC Design finalists is Siafu PC Design. The idea behind Siafu was to give people with vision loss an intuitive computer experience. It provides a digitally tactile interface that completely revolutionizes the way that blind people interact with a computer. Siafu lays flat like a tablet and allows the user to fully interact with it by way of touch. The surface of Siafu utilizes a conceptual material called magneclay. This material has the ability to morph upward into any shape. This means that Siafu can generate infinitely refreshable braille and then display it in a book format instead of just one line at a time like current braille displays. Siafu also has the ability to display images as a 3-dimensional relief, allowing blind computer users to experience digital images, and graphic layouts for the first time.
This product is to be used by people who have experienced a loss of sight. Siafu allows users to read text by generating full page braille displays.
The onscreen relief feature also allows users to explore the internet and navigate through websites by physically touching, clicking, and dragging the graphic elements, links, and arrows of the web page. Siafu is also capable of converting all onscreen text to braille relief, so that the user can read whatever is on the screen first hand.
Designer : Jonathan Lucas via NextGenDesign
