Development in Tactile interfaces

Some (not so) recent developments:

1. Visual art accessible for the blind through "High-quality tactile paintings" (PDF)
2. Touchscreens that sends tactile information to the hand through the display (video).

Both technologies mean a technical advancement per se, but to really be helpful to visually impaired people I believe a second component must come in place: cognitively motivated abstraction of the rich details a visual depiction usually has. Be invited to browse the webpage of my PhD project about cognitively-adequate schematization of tactile maps to learn more about that approach.