Other people have mentioned what a braille display is, so I'll just say that I own one and love it. Reading braille on a braille display is much easier and more convenient than peper, and the convenience of being able to connect it to your phone, computer, etc gives you access to mountains of written materials in braille. It's great.

Looking at your post history, it sounds like you might be losing sight. If that's the case, braille probably isn't the #1 skill you need to start with. Are you working with an organization that provides blindness skills training or receiving rehab services?

I say they are *definitly* worth getting, if you can afford them or get a rehab agency to provide one. Some of the older models can be found, used, online for under $1000, but most come from venders from $1000 to $5500 (I think there are some big ones that can get up to $8000 or more).

Also worth noting is that they're all one line. People have been trying to engineer an affordable full-page display for decades, but it turns out that puting thousands of small, moving parts into a rectangle more than 4 dots high is a really hard engineering problem.

Also-also, there is a recently-released $500 braille display, but it seems to be perpetually out of stock. You can find it from APH.

A braille display is a device that connects to your phone or computer or multiple devices at one¢once and displays text and interactive elements in a row of physically changing braille dots on the device. Some have 20 braille cells, some have 40 cells and all manner of variants. The displays also have buttons to type braille and quickly navigate through whatever device you are connected to, plus some are stand-alone notetakers that can create Word and Excel documents right from the device itself. So it allows you to read things in braille from your devices, allows you to type in braille to interact with the devices whether it's texting, writing, or navigating apps, and they can be a portable notetaking device and a way to interact with your phone when out and about without relying on the VoiceOver or screen reader spoken feedback since you are just feeling it all through the braille on the display.

I have one, but don't use it much but may need to get into using it more so I can quickly read through lines of code when I'm programming or writing. It's good for keemping your braille skills sharpened and practical if you prefer braille typing methods to using the braille screen input or a normal computer keyboard.

Some displays can read PDF files which is nice since it can generally parse the text in documents when they are made correctly and have a host of other functions which can be programmed to whichever device you are interacting with using the display.

They're small boxes, ranging from smartphone sized to the width of a large laptop, that have a strip of braille cells, and usually a USB plug at the very least.

Most models have bluetooth, a perkins keyboard, buttons to navigate, and an SD card slot, but again, not always.

They work by turning plain text into Braille, by pushing up pins. I believe they have little plastic/rubber ends, but the whole thing could be plastic for all I know.

I'd recommend one if you have that kind of disposeable income, they definitely can come in handy.