Developing a low cost Braille converter

Developing a low cost Braille converter

Illustrative project image

Medical tags

Clinical need
Other supporting equipment
Project keywords
Braille,Braille converter,Letter, Education, Blind, Scanning , Solenoids ,Pattern
Device classification

Project description

Braille is the alphabet recognizing system for the blind which is being used for quite a long time. However printing a book in braille is quite expensive till now and also ,the materials are not widely available. A full set of braille reader can cost upto 20,000 taka(about $250).So a developing country like Bangladesh(almost 40,000 blind children among 80,000 blind population),having a low and middle class socio economic state ,cannot afford to print necessary books into braille for primary education, let alone higher education. Engineers are trying to solve this problem by designing a braille converter and some solutions are efficient too, but not cheap and affordable. This project's goal is to develop a cheap way with low resource settings that can automatically convert any book to readable braille output which can be widely affordable.
   To enable our system to read and covert printed letters to braille, it consists of a scanning module and an output surface module. The scanning module will scan each sentence of a book simultaneously and its software part will recognize and separate every letter in every word of a sentence. The readings will be sent to the output surface, which is built with an array of solenoids. There will be 20 units in the surface, each unit built by 6 solenoids ( 2*3). So each unit is designed to indicate a letter, and the surface can produce 20 letters at a time. So according to the readings of the scanning module, whether it’s a letter or a space or a punctuation symbol, the units will rise its dots for a particular letter or won't rise any, following the braille pattern. Thus with a certain pace determined by the reader, the surface will convert each sentence of a book simultaneously, converting 20 letters at a time. The units are designed in such a way that each unit fits underneath the fingertip and the person can read it properly with his/her fingertips. 
It will be a simple and cheap way that can efficiently perform and let the blind come to the light of letters. It is expected that this project can be widely manufactured and will be affordable for middle and lower class income families.