Who says the visually-impaired has to commit thousands of songs' lyrics to memory just to enjoy karaoke nights with their buddies? In Japan, land of the Karaoke, Xing and Nippon Telesoft are releasing the very first Braille Karaoke technology. The system works by connecting the Nippon Telesoft Seika Braille display (picture after the jump) via USB to a computer running Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard. That particular Mac OS has a screen reader application called VoiceOver which supports the Seika display.

When a song is played, VoiceOver detects the lyrics and sends info over to the Seika display to be translated into Braille (40 Braille characters are projected ahead of the song). The Braille Karaoke will be sold in Japan starting this fall, and since there's actually an English web site dedicated to it, there's high chance it'll be released in other countries as well.