Ask HN: Why don't keyboards have braille?

7 points

9 years ago

In reading How Technology Is Besting My Blindness, a person's account of how technology helps him mitigate and overcome the challenges of his disappearing eyesite, I began to wonder why keyboards don't commonly include brail on the keys.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-19/how-technology-is-besting-my-blindness

I'm a competent, sighted touch-typist, but even so I still have to occasionally look at the keyboard to find a little-used key, or one that's been moved or oddly sized relative to other keyboards.

The reason this works for me is that ... the name of the key is printed on the key. It's great to be sighted.

I imagine, with no experience or evidence, that there may be apps that help sight-challenged people learn what each key is. And I don't know whether braille is anywhere close to universally learned.

So the question is posed: Why don't keyboards include braille, and why is there no movement to make it so?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=braille+keyboards&ia=products

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