[luplex]

I had a blind classmate back in high school (starting ~2008) who used a laptop and a single-line braille display, and wow I did not know her equipment was that expensive! It just seemed like a reasonably straight-forward piece of hardware to me.

[whacked_new]

I'm sighted, but bought a used braille display for slightly less than $200 to learn braille for fun. It's pretty impressive to actuate hundreds of tiny dots at a time, for every sentence you need to read. Every once in a while one dot doesn't drop back when the display is refreshed, and since you're swiping your fingers across the display, feeling (or maybe I was seeing?) that one oddly placed dot is disorienting.

Maybe that feeling goes away with fluency, which I can't speak to, but I have a lot of respect for the engineering that goes into these displays. Granted, I'm not a hardware person.

[bluGill]

There isn't enough demand to scale it. If everyone in the world would buy a brail display they could make them for cheap, but only a few buy them, and those buyers need to support all the costs of setting up manufacturing.