Vibrating Braille Handsets created by Blind Japanese?

Vibrating Braille Handsets created by Blind Japanese? Nobuyuki Sasaki, a former Tsukuba University of Technology professor, and his team have developed a new technology that converts the keypad key-presses into vibrating pulses (presumably correlated to the Braille alphabet). This handset can help the blind get more out of their mobile phones.

The vibrations and key-press conversions are handled by an external terminal. When the user "pushes numbers on the keypad corresponding to Braille symbols, two terminals attached to the receiver's phone vibrate at a specific rate to create a message".

The team's next goal is to make the terminal smaller and more portable. Hopefully small enough to be a commercially viable solution for blind cellphone users.

Japanese Braille uses six dots to represent the Japanese syllabary. Using the numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8, on cell phones to represent these six dots, it's possible to form Braille symbols. The developers are now working to make the devices that convert keypad information into vibrations smaller than their current size (16 centimeters by 10 centimeters). If vibration-based Braille is applied more widely, it may enable information to be "broadcast" to several blind people at once.

(source)