Nokia reaches out to visually impaired

Businesses that are launching an SMS marketing campaign may be able to broaden their reach courtesy of a new Nokia application aimed at blind people.

Mobile phone users with visual impairments have so far been unable to benefit from the growing popularity of text messaging in recent years.

However, Nokia is hoping to redress this balance with its new Nokia Braille Reader, which turns an SMS message into vibrations that correspond with Braille symbols.

This means that blind people can understand an incoming text by reading the vibrations generated by their mobile phone.

Writing on the Nokia blog, spokesperson Roope Takala commented: "We have been thinking of how to do something about accessibility for quite a while."

According to recent figures from uSwitch, the average person in the UK sends about 67 SMS messages each month, which means that approximately 60 billion texts are sent in Britain alone every year.