Multi-modal Language/ Education Technology
Refreshable Braille Reader
Project Principal Investigator(s):Sujit Kumar Chakrabarti, Supriya Dey (Vision Empower), Paul D’Souza (ToucheTech Labs)
There are about 15 million blind people in India. For blind people to lead a life of dignity and self-reliance, it is very important that they have comparable opportunities to get trained, skilled and educated like any other person. An important step towards achieving this goal is to make all the educational content that is available to others, also available to the blind. However, in their current form most educational content is not accessible to the blind. Following are some of the major issues:
- Most text is not translated to Braille, the de facto script for the blind.
- When available, Braille books tend to be too bulky, hampering mobility.
- Finding suitable representation for the blind is a challenge for subjects like Mathematics and Science where much of the content is in the forms of figures and graphs.
- Braille support for Indian languages is available but not very good.
In this project we will develop technology to make educational content accessible to the blind, in particular, blind school children preferably in under-privileged parts of the society.
Our starting point is a Refreshable Braille Reader developed by ToucheTech Labs. The basic feature of this device is to read text files and present them in Braille to a blind reader using a refreshable tactile display. However, in its current form, the device faces several challenges related to its cost, usability, ergonomy etc. before it is ready for production.
The specific problems that will be addressed in this project are the following:
- Develop technology which will help lower the cost and help provide a more ergonomic interface to the user.
- Using early prototypes of the device, conduct user-studies to create data about the precise requirements on the ground.
- To create the required awareness to identify the actual market for the device and take it to the users on the ground.
Refreshable Braille Reader
