(Photo: Kriyate Design Solutions)
Kriyate Design Solutions, a start-up company in India, has developed a phone specifically for people with visual impairments. The phone has metal pins built into the body that raise and lower, permitting users to read text in Braille. This is an interface that offers radically new opportunities. Bob Yirka explains in PhysOrg:
Up till now, blind people have had to rely on apps (such as Georgie developed by Sight and Sound Technology) to use their smartphones. Such apps typically make use of GPS to help those that cannot see find their way around unknown areas and to help read signs, menus, etc. With this new innovation, blind users will be able to send and receive text messages, read web content, use custom apps (including those with GPS abilities) and even take pictures of things and look at them using their fingers. It's a significant step forward and likely would not have occurred had not an insightful person come up with a workable idea, and then been backed by a company with very deep pockets and no expectations of making a profit from its investment.
-via Gearfuse