In the mid-80's I had a friend who was blind. He wanted to study computers, so the state bought him an Amiga 1000 because it has built-in speech capabilities.<p>But the accessory he seemed to use the most was a device that sat above the keyboard that was an array of maybe 200x50 pins that moved in and out. He could use it as a window to scroll around the display (I think it followed the mouse pointer) and use his fingers to "see" the menu bars and controls, etc... It was pretty cool. A little noisy, but not as noisy as a dot matrix printer of the time.<p>He also had a self-contained DOS computer with no screen that had an input keyboard like a stenographer's keyboard. It was about the size of a paperback book, and the output was voice-only. I thought it was neat, but he didn't like it because it was from Australia, and the combination of the crude voice synthesis of the time, and a heavy Australian accent made it hard to understand. I thought it was cool for the very same reason.