Computers are just as important to people who are blind as they are to the rest of us. But current systems of translating screen displays into the raised dot letters of the Braille alphabet are pretty clumsy: They require nearly 500 moving parts called actuators to display entire pages at a time. Now comes a device, invented by John Roberts and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md., that uses as few as three moving parts.

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