Nokia Braille Reader released Sept. 17

From DNA India:

Although mobile phones have been a great communicating aid for the blind, there was one aspect in which they were quite useless. Text messaging.

But now, Nokia Beta Labs, known for their cutting-edge software research, have come up with a cell phone version of Braille, the script the visually impaired can understand.
Called Nokia Braille Reader (pictured), the application — released on September 17 — was developed in collaboration with the Finnish Federation of the Visually Impaired and Tampere University.

The application is available for the Nokia N97, 5800 XpressMusic, N97 mini, 5530, 5230 and X6 models. What it does is to transform an SMS into a set of vibrations corresponding with the symbols of the Braille script. The symbols can be understood by the strength of the vibration.

Nokia’s latest innovation is the first that lets a blind person read an SMS privately.

Previous solutions entailed the handset rendering a message through voice — not a very personal experience.

Roope Takala, a senior manager at Nokia, wrote on the Nokia blog: “We have been thinking of how to do something concrete about accessibility (for the blind) for quite a while. Our Nokia Braille Reader application… was conceptualised together with actual users and researchers focusing on the topic, and we are now happy to show the first experimental version of the concept.”

Nokia recently launched its app store Nokia Ovi, from which specific applications can be downloaded.

Such applications are also a source of revenue for telecom service providers, for whom value-added services translate into 11% of annual collections.