Samsung releases Braille mobile phone for blind and vision impaired

[pne]

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.