Braille is widely used by people with vision impairments, but despite widespread improvements to accessibility on the web and smart devices, innovation for braille-reader hardware has essentially been stalled. Dot has taken a huge step forward with a smart braille device that not only allows for easy display of text, but tactile representations of imagery, potentially opening an entirely new layer for education and accessible content.

The Dot Pad consists of 2,400 pins in a pixel-like grid that can quickly be set to be in up or down positions, forming letters in braille or easily identifiable shapes. That's room for 300 braille glyphs, plus 20 more in a more traditionally spaced line below. Crucially, the device also integrates directly into Apple's VoiceOver screen reading feature, making reading text, icon labels and even graphs or simple images just a tap away.

The company, based in Korea, was formed when co-founders Ki Kwang Sung and Eric Ju Yoon Kim found themselves fed up with the lack of options for learning and reading despite so many other advances in computing and interfaces.

This isn't the first digital braille display by a long shot — devices like this have existed for decades, but they've been decidedly limited in both quantity and capability. Most commonly you'll find braille displays for reading digital text, but these are often clunky old one-line machines that haven't changed in many years, and rely on other legacy software and hardware.

These devices are also generally not created with kids and learning in mind. Children with visual impairments are subject to a number of systematic disadvantages, such as a lack of textbooks or activities created with them in mind. It's this lack that led the parents of one such kid to create the BecDot, a toy that helps teach braille at the toddler level.

"In the 21st century, it didn't make sense that visually impaired people cannot access graphical information in a digital way," said Sung. "There are a lot of innovations out there in every industry, including education, jobs and social network services... the requirement of graphical information is getting higher, which means visually impaired people are getting cut off. Even in the pandemic situation, remote work and education was mandatory... but they didn't have any solution to do that."