Growing up blind, I carried heavy books to school in a bag that weighed close to six kilograms, and I dragged my Perkins Brailler back and forth with me every day, roughly the same weight again.
In those days I’d watch, with something close to dread, my older blind sister hauling a suitcase to and from her school. Inside it: her books. And in that moment I asked myself: am I going to be carrying a bag like that by the time I reach secondary school?
Then, suddenly, the future shone in like the rising sun.
Welcome to the age of electronic Braille displays! Small devices that can hold hundreds of books, text files, and audio clips. Not only that: you can browse the internet through them, search for information, a whole world under your fingertips! And don’t worry, each one weighs no more than two and a half kilos. All you need to own one is twenty thousand Saudi Riyals. Seize the opportunity. Stay ahead of the curve.
What kind of future is this? What kind of astronomical price?
Despite the cost, I went after one on installments. I kept paying for four years. I didn’t care at the time. I had to have a Braille display to keep up with school and work.
Then smart devices entered every home, computer prices fell to the point where most people could own one, and the gap between blind users and everyone else narrowed. Specialized device after specialized device for the blind was replaced by a free or cheap app on an iPhone.
But Braille displays stayed where they were. The astronomical prices still stand between thousands of blind users and the device they’d actually use. I’ll try, in this piece, to answer part of this stubborn question, as honestly as I can:
Why are electronic Braille displays so expensive?
A Brief History
The Braille system is a refined version of secret codes that Charles Barbier created for the French army under Napoleon in the 19th century. Barbier’s codes used twelve dots arranged in groups, mapped to sounds soldiers could use to communicate quietly.
Louis Braille met Barbier in Paris in 1821, and from that encounter he distilled the Braille we know today: six dots per cell, each combination representing a letter or symbol.
Louis Braille died in 1853, a year before France officially adopted his system as the standard for written communication with blind people.
Electronic Braille Displays Through Time
Braille devices kept evolving. In 1960, IBM and the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, Kentucky produced the first machine to translate ordinary print into Braille, used internally at the printing house.
In 1970, inventor Norman B. filed the first patent for a Braille line that could be refreshed electronically, by sending electrical signals to each dot in each cell.
The technology accelerated from there, and patents accumulated around it, but most of them still rely on the same core mechanism described in that 1970 filing. Research in this space continues today.
On the operating-system side: early Braille displays used minimal systems for limited tasks, then moved to Windows CE, which let them handle text more thoughtfully, manage files and folders, and connect to the internet.
Today, most advanced Braille displays run Android, which gives them access to the Google Play Store, YouTube videos, and social-media sharing.
So Where Does the Price Come From?
To understand why these displays cost what they do, we have to start with how they work.
Inside an Electronic Braille Display
Open up most electronic Braille displays and you’ll find a lot of wires running from the motherboard, sending electrical signals to a particular kind of crystal.
These crystals expand when a specific voltage is applied, and contract back to their original size when the signal is removed. The technology is called ceramic piezoelectric bimorphs.
A crystal sits beneath each Braille dot on the display. When the crystal expands or contracts, it moves a small lever, which in turn raises or lowers a pin tipped with a sharpened head, representing one Braille dot up or down.
So if you have a 32-cell Braille display, you need 8 crystals, 8 levers, and 8 pins for every dot in every cell. That comes to 256 dots per display.
This is where a lot of the cost lives. Doing this reliably, at scale, is genuinely difficult.
Patent Licensing
Braille-display technology is usually protected by patents. A manufacturer often has to pay either a flat fee or a percentage of each unit sold to the patent-holder, in order to avoid IP litigation and accusations of patent theft, the same pattern you see between large tech companies.
Hardware, Software, and Development Time
In fairness, the hardware inside Braille displays isn’t impressive. In my view it doesn’t compare to consumer devices that cost tens of times less and perform tens of times better. But it does meet the baseline a typical user needs, the simple mobile tasks done well enough, especially on the Android-based displays that have appeared in recent years.
That doesn’t mean the hardware and software are easy to develop. The manufacturer has to build a system that’s compatible with the specific hardware inside the display, polished enough that a beginner (the most-targeted audience for these devices) can use it without friction.
The work spans battery-life testing, the Braille rendering itself, custom apps for the display, compatibility with apps downloaded from the Google Play Store, and a lot more.
I want to pause here. Software development and testing take a lot of time and effort. I won’t pretend the pressures and challenges these developers face are nothing. They’re some of the hardest, most complex stages of the work, and anyone who has been through extensive software development knows the frustrations.
So the price of these devices reflects the hardware inside them, the salaries of the engineers continuously refining the user experience, and the operational overhead of letting them do that work smoothly.
Arabic Localization
Manufacturers in the Western market do significant work, and the same is true of the companies that handle Arabic localization.
This usually isn’t just translation. The localization team often has to re-engineer parts of the system to accommodate Arabic. I won’t go into the messy details, but it’s a long process where small details matter, and proper bilingual support without major problems takes serious work.
Research
Manufacturers invest in research to evolve Braille-display technology and to plan future projects, all of which costs money to sustain.
You may have noticed slightly cheaper products from a few companies entering the market lately. That’s research at work, aimed at improving display quality and lowering prices wherever possible.
Operations, Marketing, Profit
The reality is, we’re dealing with for-profit companies, not charities sustained by donations. They need significant capital to keep producing and competing, on top of marketing spend, legal and accounting fees, other operational costs, and government taxes.
We shouldn’t forget profit. Plenty of companies have gone bankrupt or been merged into others when their finances soured or the broader economy turned. The COVID-19 pandemic was a clear lesson.
Supply and Demand
Blind users hold off on buying Braille displays because of how expensive they are, and companies can’t lower prices because the order volumes are too small. In manufacturing, unit costs fall as quantity rises.
This loop keeps Braille displays out of the hands of the people who would actually use them. Companies like Orbit have tried to break the cycle by releasing a low-priced device, and maybe the coming years will surface more solutions.
A Look at Future Braille Technologies
Several companies, associations, and institutions have published research on alternative methods for raising Braille dots, beyond ceramic piezoelectric bimorphs. Sadly, many of those projects never got finished, for lack of funding.
One example: Pera Technology launched a project called Anagraphs, which received over 1.3 million euros in EU support, roughly 5 million Saudi Riyals.
The idea was a book reader for the blind that focuses heat on paraffin wax to expand it and raise the Braille dots. Because paraffin wax is cheap, the production cost of Braille displays using this technology would have dropped significantly.
In 2014, the project ran out of money and shut down.
It’s time for the major tech companies, Apple and Microsoft among them, to enter the Braille-display world and change it permanently, the way they reshaped smartphones and personal computers.
I’ve read research on rendering Braille dots on a screen using magnetic fields, or using vibration techniques. Those remain papers we are still waiting to see bear fruit.
My Own View on Electronic Braille Displays
Braille displays haven’t impressed me in a long time. The combination of high prices and modest specs means I only reach for mine for the narrowest tasks now: reading text, taking notes.
What I’ve tried to do in this piece is to spotlight some of the reasons behind those high prices, honestly and without taking sides, not to justify the companies and their policies, but to lay out the reality of Braille technology, and the tragedy in it.
We Still Have a Long Way to Go
In a world where technological progress accelerates in every direction, the leading innovators have to work to change the status quo. The high prices of Braille displays have led to dire consequences, and conditions will keep deteriorating unless real support and serious commitment to development arrive.
The high prices have driven many blind people away from Braille, the only reading and writing method available to a blind person, and the gap between Braille and modern tools for learning and entertainment has grown. We live in a world whose ink is starting to dry, whose pages are starting to fall, replaced by touchscreens.
Will Braille fade away? Will sound replace touch in reading and writing?
God knows.