I’m reminded of an idea I had fairly early in my days as a blind person.
The main idea was a grid of square buttons, perhaps 1020, 1224, or 16*32 buttons, somewhere in size between pocket calculator buttons and desktop keyboard keys in size, but they would all be of the “clicky” type used for toggles on small appliances and could either be toggled by the user or by the hardware.
Some ideas for how to use them in games included:
tactile tetris where empty spaces in the well are represented with a button being down and filled spaces with the button being up.
If you remember those late-90s/early-00s handhelds that boasted “hundreds of games” that used monochrome LCDs hardwired for Tetris-like monominoes and justed used variants of that simple style of graphics for different simple games, I could imagine this being like a tactile version.
An SRPG or virtual TTRPG battle map or virtual traditional board game where occupied grid squares are up and vacant squares are down and you could get info on a unit or make slections by pressing buttons. e.g. Press down a square representing your unit/piece, then press a vacant square to move them to.
Ideas I had to build upon the basic idea included making the square buttons touch/pressure sensitive(e.g. making it so you could move a tetromino in tactile tetris bynudging the raised buttons that comprise it, touch a unit’s square to get summary information read, but press the button to select), retractable walls and posts to mark the edges and vertices of the grid(e.g. a maze map with raised walls for the maze walls and raised squares for entities in the maze, raised walls to indicate boundaries on a battle map or to outline the area your units can move within, a checkers game where Red is raised squares with no walls, black are raised squares with raised walls, and kings have the pegs at the coarnders of their square raised), or a version based on a hex grid.
And I was thinking a 5*5 version that plays a tactile version of Lights out would be a good proof of concept.
Probably not as versatile as a proper tactile graphics display, but I figure clicky toggle buttons are a stock enough component(or at least were prior to touchscreens being shoehorned into everything) and grids of buttons is something we’ve been making on the cheap for decades, so at worst, perhaps the basic version of such a device could be made in the premium keyboard/gamepad price bracket and there’s a ton of simple abstract strategy and puzzle games that could benefit tremendously from such.
And hey, even if it can’t do proper braille, I still feel like 5dpI with 8-bit grayscale in a panel roughly the size of a sheet of printer paper at a sub-$1000 price tag would be a huge step forward. Still pricier than many blind people could afford, but at least in the realm of something one could realistically save up for and comparable to what sighted people pay for fancy gadgets that lose most of their appeal when you can’t see.