Dot Brings Smartwatch Functionality to the Visually-Impaired Dylan Duarte August 3, 2015 News We take a lot of things for granted, which is especially easy to do when it’s something you’ve had since birth. Take your vision, for example. There are an estimated 39 million blind people in the world, and they don’t get to experience most of the cool tech that we talk about here on MEGATech News. However, with the advent of Dot, they finally get to see what smartwatches are all about. Dot resembles a Fitbit and provides many of the same functions as your standard smartwatch, but there’s one key difference: it does it all with braille. In lieu of a screen, the face of the Dot smartwatch features a grid of pins that rise and fall, spelling out words at a customizable speed. Dot also has ebook functionality and costs much less than a portable braille reader. Unfortunately, according to the US-based National Federation of the Blind, only 10 percent of visually impaired people actually learn how to read braille. According to the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People, that figure is actually less than 1 percent. Regardless of who is correct, hopefully that number will increase thanks to Dot’s braille-learning system. Pre-orders for the Dot smartwatch begin this year and should cost less than $300. Share This With The World!
