Text to Braille Scanner with Ultra Low Cost Refreshable Braille Display

Braille is the ubiquitous method used to consume text material by the visually impaired and blind but braille forms of most books and educational material are not available especially in third world countries. For displaying digital text documents in braille form, electronic refreshable displays, have been available for quite some time. However since inception, they have been very expensive and out of reach financially for many in third world countries. This paper presents a solution to these problems – an open source text to braille scanner along with a unique low cost refreshable braille display. The proposed display generates all Braille characters by simple sliding arrangement of two eleven-slot pre-protruded sliders utilizing permutations of the slots. Unlike conventional piezo-electric based displays that consumes a large amount of power to generate each character by dynamically actuating various slots, the proposed display requires extremely low power just to carry out linear sliding of the sliders without the need of individual slot excitation. The text scanner is presented in the form of a mobile app, built using Google's open source optical character recognition (OCR) engine. The scanner app is currently capable of converting English text printed in a multitude of fonts into braille in real time without any internet connectivity. The app also features assistive technologies such as voice guidance and tactile feedback to assist the visually impaired user in scanning documents. The proposed device is implemented in a modular fashion such that one can easily expand to have more characters to be displayed. Finally the performance of the proposed display device has been tested under various conditions and a very satisfactory performance is achieved, in terms of cost, comfort of use and speed.