[tdeck]

> but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters

Worth noting that this is because refreshable braille cells are really expensive to build, not because people necessarily want to be limited to such a short window of text. The Orbit Reader 20 (20 columns) is $800 and that's considered a "low cost" option.

[vunderba]

There was a device called "Braille Me" announced some years ago, a 20-cell magnetically based reader which was intended to be a more affordable option, but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

https://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/technology/brailleme.html?from_se...

[tdeck]

There's a lot of vaporware in Braille tech where people announce they can sell something for $X and then it either doesn't materialize at all or costs much more on release.