Internet browser facility and method for the visually impaired

DETAILED DESCRIPTION As the Internet has become an important communication tool, the visually impaired require display devices that permit Internet content such as web pages to be displayed.
Electro-mechanical devices have served to translate text into a tactilely readable format such as the Braille character set, which employs a matrix of tactile elements for each character, symbol, or word, with each element either being a flat spot or a raised bump.
The standard Braille character set uses an 8-dot matrix (2 columns of 4 dots), allowing adequate permutations, with the character matrices spaced apart on a surface to allow them to be distinguished.
To display graphic content, such as icons, symbols, a cursor, borders, arrows, drawings, and photo images, a tactile device requires that the tactile elements be evenly and closely spaced apart.
Such devices have been proposed which use a matrix arranged on a standard Braille 1.
5 mm dot pitch, so that Braille characters are displayed by leaving intervening columns and rows of dots blank or flat, and so that simple graphic images are displayed in a dot matrix fashion using all available tactile elements.
Other systems may be developed having a tactile element matrix with a finer resolution than the standard Braille dot spacing, with each dot generated by raising a cluster of tactile elements, and a number of inactive tactile elements between each adjacent Braille dot.
This would permit a finer resolution for graphical purposes than provided for by the standard Braille dot pitch.
However, these systems are believed to be currently limited to the simple translation of electronic text (such as may be received in ASCII format) into strings of tactilely displayed Braille symbols.
Since much of the content of a web page or other file may be in non-text form, this is not discemable to a visually impaired user of current Braille display devices.
Current systems lack a means of identifying which words are selectable hypertext links to other web pages or downloadable content, nor do they provide a convenient means to locate such links on a page of text or to select and activate such links