A full page braille display?
Is it really approaching?
Posted by Kim Kilpatrick
Thanks again to the people at Blind Bargains for this article.
Many of us (if we are lucky enough to be able to afford one) have used refreshable braille displays with our computers and smart phones.
These displays are wonderful.
They allow me to read in braille what is on my computer or device.
If anyone wants help learning to use their displays, I am able to provide training with the following displays and notetakers.
Braille note
Braille sense
Focus braille displays
braille edge
Although these displays are wonderful, they only display one line of braille at a time.
For some things, this works well.
However, for math, for times when you need to touch the whole page at once to feel the lay out, skim over a schedule, etc, having more than one line of braille would be wonderfully helpful.
The refreshable braille cells are extremely expensive.
See the article below for a possible new development in this field.
Austrian Researchers Tackling Full Page Braille Display Challenge with BLITAB
A team of researchers has recently raised over $10,000 to create an alpha prototype for BLITAB, a full-page braille display project which has been in development for three years. The claim on the project’s page as the “world’s first tablet for blind people” is perhaps a bit misleading, but the project itself has some lofty goals. The BLITAB would include braille translation features as well as a GPS and support for obtaining information from NFC tags.
The project’s Indiegogo crowdfunding page describes the technology like this:
BLITAB is a next curve Braille device for reading and writing that displays one whole page Braille text, without mechanical elements. It is like an e-book which instead of using a screen displays small physical bubbles. They rise and fall on demand, composing a whole page in Braille code without any mechanical elements.
The project has received support from some major corporations including T-Mobile, Volkswagen, and 3M. The full-page braille display is a challenge that many have tackled, but to this point, no devices are available for retail. Perhaps the BLITAB will be the one to buck the trend.
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GTT Program blog and resources 
Scanning type full page braille display was launched by Tactisplay Corp.
You can check information at http://www.tactisplay.com/product/tactisplay-table
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