It’s something called the Mantis Q40 and it’s a refreshable Braille display. This device allows me to interact with my computer usingBraille is a reading and writing system of raised dots, which are read by touching them with your fingertips. I use it because I’m blind.
The Mantis Q40 is a device about the size of a sheet of A4 – most of the space is taken up by a QWERTY keyboard but at the bottom is a row of 40 refreshable Braille cells. All this is a very roundabout way of saying that I have a line of Braille which changes under my fingers as I work, enabling me to take in information as I type, or look up and read stored information.Refreshable Braille is surprisingly old technology, developed by a company in Germany called Papenmeier in 1975. I first came across it aged 17 in 1982 when a machine called a VersaBraille was loaned to my school.