If you have been putting off a decision about a magnifier or a braille display because the prices are high and the specifications blur together, the last week of May is when that decision gets a little easier. That is when roughly 150 companies bring their vision technology to Frankfurt for SightCity, the largest trade fair in the world for products built for blind and low vision users. Much of what appears on that floor reaches American homes six months to two years later, and some of it never crosses the Atlantic at all. Knowing what was shown tells you what your choices are about to become, and which questions to bring to your next appointment.

What SightCity Is and How to Attend Without a Plane Ticket

SightCity 2026 ran from May 27 through May 29 at Kap Europa, the congress center attached to Messe Frankfurt. About 150 international exhibitors filled roughly 7,600 square meters across four floors. Admission at the door cost five euros per day and was waived completely for anyone who registered online in advance.

The fair runs as a hybrid event. The SightCity Forum lecture program, covering new product developments alongside medical and social-policy topics, streams over Zoom, and recordings are posted to the fair's YouTube channel afterward when the speaker agrees. A parent in Ohio can sit through the same sessions as a rehabilitation specialist in Munich.

The fair also runs the FeelVision Award, presented for the third time in 2026. Attendees vote by scanning a QR code at the booth of each nominated product. The voters are the people who use these devices every day, so the nominee list carries more signal than a typical industry prize.

Braille Displays Stopped Being One Size Fits Everyone

The most substantive shift at the 2026 fair was in braille hardware, and specifically in the idea that a braille display should be configured to a person rather than picked off a shelf.

Help Tech's myBraille drew the most attention. It carries 40 refreshable braille modules, an eight-key braille keyboard, thumb keys, panning keys, cursor routing keys, and a four-way directional pad. Bluetooth 5.1 pairs it with as many as five devices at once, USB-C handles wired connection and charging, an onboard notepad works without a host device, and the battery is rated at 20 hours. The cell caps were redesigned as one continuous surface, which changes how a fingertip tracks across the line during long reading sessions.

Help Tech also showed the Activator, a 40-cell display with concave cells, contracted braille built in, a folding keyboard that gives both QWERTY and braille entry, and more than 30 hours of battery life. The Activator Pro scales that up to 64 or 80 cells and adds QuickAccess keys, macro support, and an ActiveSplit mode for reading two documents side by side.

Two other braille devices were nominated for the FeelVision Award. Nippon Telesoft's Seika Mini Plus2 is an Android notetaker that doubles as a braille display over USB or Bluetooth, with a SIM card slot that turns it into a standalone phone. The BrailleNote evolve pairs a braille-first workflow through the KeySoft environment with a Windows 11 Pro machine underneath, so a student can work in braille and still open the same files the rest of the class is using.

Cell count is the single largest driver of price on any of these, and it is the specification most people guess at. Forty cells suits reading email, notes, and most schoolwork. Sixty-four or 80 cells earns its cost when someone reads code, spreadsheets, or dense technical material. Before comparing brands, confirm which display works with the screen reader software the person already uses at school or work.

A Magnifier Built for the Board and the Book at the Same Time

The Exigo 4U approaches electronic magnification differently. It uses two high-resolution 12.5-inch displays, one showing near material and one showing distance material, so a whiteboard and an open textbook are visible simultaneously.

The swing of a single camera between the whiteboard and the desk is where students with low vision most often lose their place, and two screens remove the swing. For context on US pricing, handheld optical magnifiers generally run $50 to $300, while video magnifiers land between $1,000 and $5,000 depending on screen size, portability, and camera quality. A dual-display classroom unit sits at the upper end of that range.

Glasses That Signal Through Touch Instead of Speech

Two nominated products moved away from the camera-and-voice model that dominates consumer smart glasses.

TAMI, from the Swiss company Lighthouse Tech, detects obstacles at upper-body height, the zone a white cane sweeps underneath. It signals through vibration in the temples of the frame, indicating three directions at two intensities, with no audio at all. Since the end of May it can be tested and purchased at a pharmacy in Lugano, Switzerland. That retail detail carries weight: this category is beginning to sell through ordinary storefronts rather than specialty dealers only.

The .lumen glasses read the surroundings in real time and steer the wearer with vibration patterns, without preloaded maps or any infrastructure installed in the building. The company describes users developing a sense of direction with the device within minutes.

Haptic guidance solves a problem that speech-based devices create. A person navigating a loud train platform cannot hear a spoken instruction, and a person in a quiet meeting does not want one. If you are weighing this category, our comparison of smart glasses for vision impairment covers how the camera-based options like Meta Ray-Ban and Envision differ in price and capability.

A Braille Label Printer That Does Not Require Knowing Braille

One FeelVision nominee was a portable braille label printer. Text is typed into an app or spoken aloud, and the device prints it as a tactile label. Operating it requires no braille knowledge whatsoever.

In most households, the person with time to label the medication shelf, the spice rack, and the freezer containers is sighted: a spouse, a parent, a teacher, a classroom aide. Under the older generation of embossers, that person had to learn braille first, so the labeling tended never to happen. With text entry by app or by voice, it happens on a Tuesday evening.

Buying Any of This From the United States

These companies are German, Japanese, Swiss, and Romanian, and US availability varies widely by product. HumanWare distributes the BrailleNote line here. Help Tech works through American dealers. TAMI and .lumen are at an earlier stage of distribution, and a European launch does not guarantee a US one.

A certified low vision therapist or vision rehabilitation therapist can tell you which of these devices has a US distributor and which does not. State vocational rehabilitation agencies and school assistive technology teams can often purchase equipment that individuals cannot easily buy directly, and they usually know the current dealer list. Any device should be tested against the screen reader, phone, and computer already in daily use before money changes hands. While you wait on hardware, free tools handle part of the same work, and Be My Eyes covers on-demand visual assistance at no cost.

SightCity is a preview, not a store. The most useful thing to carry out of it is a short list of the two or three tasks that are hardest right now: reading a medication label, following a whiteboard from the third row, crossing a hallway during a class change. Products turn over every May. The task list is what tells you whether any of them is worth the money.