Samsung releases Braille mobile phone for blind and vision impaired

Samsung's "Touch Messenger" mobile phone won the 2006 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).

The phone features Braille output and has twelve input keys, arranged like two Braille cells side-by-side. It will let blind and vision-impaired users send and receive text messages without having to rely on text-to-speech "which negates the privacy and unobtrusiveness intended with this form of communication".

The phone is currently only available for the Chinese market, but I found it an interesting idea.