A Useful Instrument - The Braille Watch
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Not much is known about the ways in which the visually impaired used to live their lives in ages past, but bits and pieces of information tell us that the walking cane and the guide dog have been a constant. In the twentieth century, especially after the First World War, these notions were standardized - the walking cane was painted white and the number of red stripes on it represented the severity of the condition, and several schools for guide dogs were set up. Other tools for the blind include the Braille alphabet (not the first one of its kind, but the most popular for over a century now), differentiated currency in some countries (the Euro and the Dollar notably having coins and bills of increasing sizes according to value) and, more recently, tactile paving (as warnings of upcoming differences in pavement level or other potential dangers).
Switzerland, a traditional source of high quality wrist watches, produced, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the first watch for the visually impaired. An analog watch, it differed from a regular one by the addition of embossed dots next to the figures and the lack of a glass cover. This point was to turn into a disadvantage, as it attracted various bits of fabric or hair, an annoyance to the user and a damaging factor to the time piece. The solution was to have a pop-open glass cover that the user controls in order to gain access to the dial.
As the twentieth century advanced and turned into the twenty-first, people started living their lives at much higher speed, the burst of population forcing them to become more and more competitive. This pushed many industries into coming up with ideas that would help their contemporaries, and Braille watches were thus reinvented. The so-called digital Braille watch appeared - a device that displays one line of Braille numbers, changing as the time goes by. Much more discreet, this instrument is designed in such a way that the finger is guided towards the line of Braille figures.
Gaining in popularity among the visually impaired are the talking watches. These are electrical pieces that speak out the time to you - useful, for example, if you've never learned Braille. There are various models: some will tell the time on the hour or at pre-appointed intervals, others have a button that you can push whenever you want to know the time. There are more sophisticated talking watches that tell you the date also, and what day of the week it is.
It seems that watches for the visually impaired make no exception from the wave of technological advances that we have witnessed in recent decades. Time makers have always tried to better themselves, as proven by the evolution from large clocks to wrist watches, from mechanical to electrical, and by the apparition of such features as waterproofing or functionality in zero gravity.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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