Auguste Reymond has a brand new Classic quartz watch in the Braille Hi-Touch. You wouldn’t know it at first glance, but it’s designed especially for the blind, allowing the visually impaired to read the time with their fingertips via raised hour-markers and special hands. A hinge at 10 o’clock gives easy access to the dial. And it also happens to look good for those who are seeing it from afar. No word yet on pricing and availability.

Apple has reached an agreement with the Massachusetts attorney general’s office and the National Federation of the Blind and they will make the iTunes service more accessible to the blind. It will be called iTunes U and that area of the iTunes Store will feature educational content from colleges and universities for the blind from December 31st onward. That’s just the beginning.

Apple will also continue toward providing full accessibility of iTunes before the June 30, 2009 deadline. To top it all off Apple will be donating $250,000 to the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. Nice move by Apple, because like the new windows campaign suggests, not all users come from the same mold.

The Touch Sight concept is a camera for the visually impaired. It records sounds by transferring images with 3D embossing technology so that people who can’t see can have a recording of the sounds of the event. Those who can see use their eyes to view a photo, the blind will use their sense of touch to actually “see” the image.

It’s an innovative idea and so naturally it was one of the winning designs for the 2008 International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), which honors stand-out designs in products, ecodesign, packaging, research and concepts like this one. It’s absolutely brilliant.

This concept phone by Takumi Yoshida, looks wavier than a water bed bearing a Sumo wrestler. That’s because it’s made for the blind and the nearly blind, with lighted sides that help convey different alert messages and curvy tactile keys that make it distinguishable for the visually impaired.

It would also be good for those users who want to feel as if they have squeezed their phone into a different shape, causing it to bulge. Great idea for the sight-impaired as there aren’t many phones they can use easily.

If you’re blind, you don’t have a ton of options…for anything really. Not many companies are making special gear for you. The gear you do have doesn’t get upgraded as much as regular people’s. For instance, how many watches do you see that cater to the blind? I’m sure they are out there, but there can’t be many.

Check out this braille watch conceived by David Chavez. The Haptica Braille watch will give the blind the time, so they don’t have to have someone else tell them what time it is. For the moment, it’s just a concept and the Braille dots are on tiny disks that rotate. Only half of the disk is showing. As the time goes by and the disks rotate, the dot pattern changes. Pretty simple way to design a braille watch.

You might think this is the next step in the evolution of the Nintendo Wiimote, but it’s really a “smart” wand designed to replace that long stick that the visually impaired have been stuck with for decades. It was created by Jin Woo Han and uses a sensor on the front to detect nearby objects by providing feedback about how far away those objects are, through varying levels of vibration.

The wand even includes a tactile strip in the area where you place your thumb that will go so far as to indicate the position of objects around you. Both feedback methods beat the hell out of using audio cues, which can be unreliable if there is too much background noise. The Tactile Wand is just a concept at the moment, and we probably will not see it for a long time, but when we do see it, it will be a powerful tool for the sight impaired. I just hope it can also detect the lack of objects, like open man-holes and the like.

Zen is all about being calm with your surroundings, grasshopper. When you look at your PC, do you feel stressed? Of course you do, work, work, work. They call this the sandbox PC, and it should help to alleviate such things and put you in a calm state of mind. Users can use it without even looking at it, because it operates using an active surface which changes texture depending on the area or function you choose.

This would be particularly good for the blind or visually impaired. We are used to visual inputs, they are not. It’s quite a learning curve for those of us with sight, but I don’t think we will be seeing it anytime soon anyway. I hope I’m wrong however, because this would be great for a great tool for those who can not see.