The Kentucky Portabraille and Pocketbraille were invented and built by Fred L. Gissoni and Wayne Thompson in the 1980s. This may be of historical interest or may help someone to build a working device if they do not have access to modern equipment and materials. It also could be useful to designers of new equipment!
Here is the construction manual for the original Portabraille, with supplements and updates.
https://archive.org/details/portabraille-construction-manual-1985-86/page/n19/mode/2up
And here is the user manual:
https://archive.org/details/portabraille-users-manual
See https://afb.org/aw/10/6/16083 for more information on its history!
“In terms of the technology blind people are using today, what stands out most notably in the work of Fred Gissoni would probably be the development of the Pocketbraille and Portabraille, collaborations of Fred Gissoni and Wayne Thompson, while the two were colleagues at the Kentucky Department for the Blind. The Pocketbraille was built to be housed in a videocassette box (one for a VHS cassette, which was state-of-the-art in the mid 1980s.) One could enter data from a Perkins-style keyboard and hear it spoken through speech. When Fred learned of a braille display manufacturer in Italy, the project grew into a refreshable braille device called Portabraille. With the Portabraille, a person could enter data and read it in braille, and could transfer that data to a computer for storage or manipulation. You couldn’t store the data; you could simply write it and “dump it” as Fred explains, but it represented an astonishing breakthrough in terms of braille and portability at the time. The Kentucky Department made only 12 Portabraille units — two of which enabled blind people to retain their jobs. Rather than making a profit from the machines themselves, Gissoni and Thompson sold the detailed instructions for building the device for $5, and directed interested individuals to Southland Manufacturing for the circuit boards. About 200 copies of those instructions were purchased — by individuals representing 45 states and 20 other countries. One of the people interested in those plans and circuit boards was Deane Blazie, who had worked as a teenager for Tim Cranmer and became a lifelong friend. Deane Blazie’s interest in those plans, of course, led to the birth of the Braille ‘n Speak, a truly revolutionary product for the blind.”
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