While smartphones have accessibility features designed for users with all kinds of disabilities, smartwatches aren’t really quite as featured-packed in that department, at least not yet. Enter Dot. This is an invention by a South Korean company who has decided to create a smartwatch with braille so that the visually impaired can use it.As you can see in the image above, the Dot smartwatch features four groups of braille with six dots in each group. This allows the watch to raise the braille and produce four characters at a time, with cycle speeds ranging between 1-100 per second which should be readable by those with varying skill levels.
According to the company’s Co-founder and CEO, Eric Ju Yoon Kim said, “Until now, if you got a message on iOS from your girlfriend, for example, you had to listen to Siri read it to you in that voice, which is impersonal. Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself and hear your girlfriend’s voice saying it in your head?”
The company has managed to raise about $600,000 so far and they are aiming for an additional $1 million in their second round of funding. If all goes according to plan, the Dot smartwatch is expected to make its way to the US come December where it will retail for $300.
Filed in . Read more about Smartwatch and Wearable Tech.