I'm Jason White, I'm a university student, and also have involvements with the World Wide Web consortium's Web accessibility initiative.
I am visually impaired, and therefore rely on Braille and speech access to computer software and to the WEB. In front of me I have two types of adaptive technology. Firstly there is a refreshable Braille display, which provides a single line of Braille text, which when used in conjunction with screen access software, can monitor the text as it appears on the display. Secondly, there's the speech synthesizer which is operation with its own screen access software which essentially operates in the same manner.
Action: Jason browses a WEB page demonstrating his setup
Running down the left and right edges of the Braille display are two sets of optical sensors. Each sensor is marked by a raised line, and every second sensor is numbered in Braille. These make it possible to move quickly from one line to another on the screen or to gain an overview of the screen display. Between the three display keys, there lies a forty cell Braille display with optical sensors above the display; there's one sensor above each cell.
To the left of the display keys there are four further cells which provide status information regarding the line and column position of both the Braille display and the system cursor. And of course the most prominent feature of this particular Braille display is the conventional computer keyboard around which the Braille components are mounted.
The only other feature to mention, comprises three depressions above the numeric keypad. Their function is to provide indications of whether the num-lock, scroll-lock and caps-lock keys are active.
This design is especially good and it's quite atypical. Most Braille displays are devices which sit in front of the standard keyboard and which provide only horizontal optical sensors or more usually press buttons above each Braille cell and a certain arrangement of keys which control their operation.