A new way of presenting Braille characters on a mobile device could lead to a Braille-ready touchscreen phone.

University of Tampere in Finland and colleagues used a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which has a piezoelectric material built into the touch screen that vibrates when an electric signal is applied to it. To generate characters, they installed software that represents a raised dot as a single pulse of intense vibration, and an absent dot as a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses.