[ricket]

How... does this even work? How does a blind person construct an electrical circuit? How can they see the colors to determine a resistor, or read the capacitance on the side of a capacitor, or feel the little tiny circle that indicates which pin of an IC is pin 1? Or even just which wire is red and black?

I suppose this multimeter is the answer to which wire is red and black (is the voltage positive or negative). But I wonder about those other things.

I'm honestly just curious. And I feel bad for blind folks in one more way now.

[syntheticnature]

It's also worth noting that not all usages of "blind", such as "legally blind", are the same as total blindness. It's conceivable that extremely poor vision (acquired through natural reasons or accident) could be just good enough to allow painstaking circuit construction with a magnifier.

I suppose a breadboard could be done by feel, as well.

Also, I'll quip that I've learned through hard experience not to trust that the red and black wires are used correctly. :-)

[Hello71]

> feel the little tiny circle that indicates which pin of an IC is pin 1

kinda answered your own question there

[andyjohnson0]

Multimeters that measure resistance and capacitance are relatively common, so it presumably wouldn't be impossible to build a talking version. Ensuring that diodes and electrolytic capacitors are correctly orientated would be a challenge though.

Another problem for building anything other than simple circuits is obtaining reference material (pinouts, current/voltage limits, etc) in an accessible form. I don't know how much help screen readers would be for high-density information containing diagrams and graphs.