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.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
