Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet

One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS.

But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer.

Duran was challenged to use the camera on a mobile device, to create an app that transforms physical pages of Braille text into readable text on the device. From the get-go, there were problems with this plan.

“How does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up? How does a blind person ensure proper lighting of the paper?” Duran said in an interview with Stanford News. “Plus, the technology, while definitely helpful, would be limited in day-to-day application.”

So Duran and his mentors, Adrian Lew, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate studying computational mathematics, decided to develop awriter app, instead of a reader. Currently, the visually impaired must use desktop-based screen-reading software or specially-designed laptops with Braille displays in order to type using a computer.

Because a blind person can’t locate the keys of a virtual keyboard on a flat, glossy touchscreen, the team decided to bring the keys themselves to the user’s fingertips. Specifically, when the user sets eight fingers on the device, virtual keys align underneath each of the user’s fingers. The team’s Braille keyboard is comprised of eight keys: six that are used to compose a Braille character, a carriage return, and a backspace key. If the user gets disoriented, he or she can re-establish the keyboard layout with a lift and re-application of the hands. Such a keyboard is also useful because it customizes itself to the user, adjusting the onscreen keys based on the user’s finger size and spacing. 

Duran demoed the app blind-folded, typing out an email address as well as complicated mathematical and scientific formulas, proving the keyboard could be useful to educators, students and researchers. He also got to see a blind person use his app for the first time, which he said was an indescribable feeling, “It was the best.”

Lew said via email, “We do not yet know how exactly this will reach final users, but we are committed to make it happen.” The team has several options they will be considering over the next few weeks, so perhaps we could even see an app end up in the Android Market soon.

 

Guest Post: Jesse Brightman

Guest Post via Jesse Brightman // @JesseBrightman

____________________

Artist John Bramblitt didn’t start painting until after he had lost his sight in his twenties. While his “twenty-five years of visual experience provided him with mental images of what he wanted to paint,” an activity he picked up mainly as an outlet and act of angry defiance, Bramblitt still understandably struggled with the fundamental fact he couldn’t see the canvas. As a replacement, he began using his sense of touch, a process for the blind called “cross-modal plasticity” which theorizes that the parts of the brain typically used in sight is reassigned to enhance a blind individual’s tactile abilities. Research suggests that this process can occur in as fast as 90 minutes!

College Students Create Device That Helps Legally Blind Students Take Notes

Remember the days of sitting in class, copying down what your teacher scribbled on the board? Now imagine the frustration you'd feel if you couldn't see that board. That's the situation San Diego State University student Jeremy Poincenot found himself in almost three years ago after contracting an extremely rare disorder called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy. As Poincenot shares in the above video, he'd lost his love for the college experience due to his inability to fully follow what was going on in class. That is, until he connected with Note-Taker, an assistive technology that helps "low-vision and legally blind students take notes in class as quickly and effectively as their fully-sighted peers."

The designers of this innnovative technology, Team Note-Taker, are four Arizona State University students—Michael Astrauskas, David Hayden, Shashank Srinivas and Qian Yan. Hayden, who is himself legally blind, inspired the team's development of the technology, which "combines a portable, custom-designed camera and a touch-screen tablet PC to allow the user to simultaneously view live video and take typed or handwritten notes on a split-screen interface."

Last week, Team Note-Taker placed second in software design in the Microsoft Imagine Cup, a technology competition for socially conscious high school and college students. With the learning capacity of countless students around the globe affected by vision loss, the development of this technology is life-changing. It's inspiring to see how it's transformed Poincenot's life by giving him the ability to fully participate in an academic experience again.