Jacques Mattheij has been working on a Braille display that is affordable. It is documented online and it’s fascinating to see all the variations and ideas the project has gone through to the current inception.
I came into contact with Mahmoud Al-Qudsi ([email protected]), who mentioned that he’d been working off-and-on on a braille reader that is both affordable and easy to manufacture. He sent me a some files and pointed to a patent that he took out on a device that uses octagonal wheels with codes on them, 8 to a wheel, two wheels side by side.
His main frustration stemmed from the fact that in spite of dirt cheap mass produced devices with ridiculous precision an affordable braille reader simply doesn’t exist. Devices are expensive, fragile and hard to get. This prompted me (Jacques) to offer my help and so we started mailing back and forth.
The sketch that Mahmoud made showed promise even if it had some serious issues which were the main reason why he never really got it to work. He abandoned the patent and seemed hopelessly stuck.
Some loose facts:
- 40 million blind people worldwide
- lots of them in undeveloped countries
- but even in developed countries access to readers is limited
Challenges:
Braille letters were defined outside of a technological frame of reference so (fortunately) ease of use by the blind trumped any kind of acknowledgement of the technological impact of those definitions, which has a massive effect on the ease with which a Braille display can be constructed.
In summary: it is a very hard mechanical problem. The size of the mechanical components is really small and the result is that standard (read: cheap) actuators all fail to satisfy the constraints placed on size and placement within the device. The result of this is that the Braille displays that are available tend to be really expensive, with the most affordable at $700 for a 40 cell 8 dot display or about $2 / dot. This price point seems to be the absolute lowest with the vast majority of the display at a fair multiple of that. Intuitively it should be possible to do *much* better than that.
Check out the interesting development thread here.