IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends In Electronics Information Communication Technology, May 20-21, 2016, India

The Braille Interface

Harshit Gupta, Aswin Anil Kumar

Abstract-- Written language is undoubtedly our primary means

of communication, along with speech. The wealth of human
knowledge accumulated through the ages is preserved in books.
We are heavily reliant on written information for gaining and
sharing knowledge. This has never been more so than after the
birth of electronic media and the Internet, as a result of which
whole libraries can be accessed from just a smartphone having an
Internet connection. But, the visually impaired miss out on these
great opportunities for learning. It can be seen that not enough
work has been done to create a suitable interface for them to
communicate with a computer, or smartphone, or any other
electronic gadget that needs to be read from. The available
products are not affordable and are quite inconvenient to use.
Our interface can be attached to any such device, enabling input
and output in the form of Braille, which the person can read with
his or her fingertip through vibrations. The implementation costs
very less and adds very little to the size of the gadget, making it a
viable option for any visually impaired person who can read
Braille
Fig. 1: A chart of Braille characters [5]
Key Words—Assistive-device, Braille, tactile, visually-impaired
This novel assistive device allows tactile communication with
1. INTRODUCTION an optional audio feedback. This device could be very useful
in the education sector for teaching visually impaired people.
Today’s world envisions more inclusion, whether social or Nowadays books from every major publishing house are
educational, people with disabilities, aiming to build a society commonly found in electronic format and the current trend is
with full participation and equality. Whether dark or white, that more and more are digitized and uploaded to the Internet.
able or disabled, male or female, one is entitled to the Right to There are many portable eBook readers available in the
Education. This is recognized in the International Covenant on market. However, there is no equivalent system for the blind.
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. [1] The main purpose of this kind of interface is to enable the
visually-impaired person to read electronic text - books,
The Braille script, invented in the early nineteenth century articles, magazines, etc. So our implementation finds good use
by Louis Braille, has become the standard tactile medium of in e - book readers for the visually impaired, where its
Communication for blind people worldwide. It enabled them implementation is cheap and easy and elegant.
to read and write like normal people and played a huge part
in their social up liftment. Comparing Braille books with other Current technological solutions which are available in
books today, however, Braille books are inconvenient due to markets for Braille reading and writing are either very costly
their relatively large dimensions and cost. When it comes to or not very handy. We have developed a device which is
electronic content, printing is not always a good option. portable and is of the size of small box. It is based on the
Instead, speech synthesis/recognition is used widely. Reading Braille cell and user can read one character at a time. It is also
the text aloud to the user via speech synthesis is widely very cheap in comparison to other products which are
practised, but, as studies show, is not as effective as reading by available in the market for the same purpose.
oneself for concentration and grasping of ideas. Speech
recognition, on the other hand, is known to be unreliable and II. LITERATURE REVIEW
ineffective in a noisy environment. In this context, we tried to
develop a system which is able to provide a blind subject Various techniques have been employed in the recent past
access to textual information by means of vibration on finger to achieve the objectives outlined in the above section. These
tips. includes Refreshable Braille Display [2], Braille Cell
recognition using image processing techniques [3], the
Harshit Gupta, Department of electronics and Communication Engineering Tactobook system [4], an e-Book reader which uses the Braille
NIT Calicut, Kozhikode, Kerala 673601 (harshit_b130774ec@nitc.ac.in,) cell, etc. The concept of Single Braille Cell has also been used
by researchers and developers in the recent past. Their method
Aswin Anil Kumar, Department of electronics and Communication involves the use of piezoelectric material, solenoids, etc and is
Engineering, NIT Calicut Kozhikode, Kerala
673601(aswin_b130775ec@nitc.ac.in) usually bulky and very costly.

978-1-5090-0774-5/16/$31.00 © 2016 IEEE

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 IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends In Electronics Information Communication Technology, May 20-21, 2016, India

III. HARDWARE COMPONENTS AND THEORETICAL They are of 8mm to 10mm in diameter. Due to their small size
BACKGROUND and enclosed vibration mechanism, coin vibrating motors are a
popular choice for haptic technologies.
The Braille interface we designed is a peripheral like a
Keyboard or a touch pad, to a computer/Smartphone that may
serve as the primary means of I/O for the user. The Braille
form of output is meant to convey only textual information, as
opposed to evolving technologies, which aim to make it
possible to feel graphical information. The parts that constitute
the interface are the keypad and the vibration pad.

A. Keypad

A keypad is often needed to provide input to an embedded

System and membrane-type keypads are an economical
solution for many applications. They are quite thin and can
easily be mounted wherever they are needed. A 3x4 membrane
matrix keypad has been used. A 3x2 sub matrix of buttons is
the Braille cell and the rest of the 12 buttons are assigned
special functions such as moving the cursor etc. The keypad is
the means of input - the Braille cell, albeit a little larger. The
buttons correspond to dots on paper, and pressing them equals
embossing the dots on paper. It is the way to input a character,
as the dots are pressed one by one

Fig. 3: The vibration pad

They need a minimum of 2.3V to 3V to start, which can be

easily provided by Raspberry Pi board. We used 6 coin
vibrating motors in order to make it resemble a single Braille
cell. Coin vibrating motors are placed underneath the pad to
achieve the vibrating effects. The spread associated with
vibration and the size of the motors are what enlarges the size
of the Braille cell. In the output, the system waits for the user
to feel all the points in the vibrating Braille Cell, to make out,
at his/her own pace, the character under the cursor. It moves at
the user’s will. With practice, considerable speeds can be
achieved.

C. Raspberry Pi

Our implementation involves the use of a Raspberry Pi B+.

The Interface is connected to this credit card-sized computer
Fig. 2: The keypad through its General Purpose Input/output pins. A program is
written to achieve text-editing functionality with the interface.
and then entered with an ’enter’ button, which is part of the A text file containing some text can be opened in read/write
keypad. mode, and depending on the user’s choice, reading or writing
actions can be performed (other actions like deletion are also
B. Vibration Pad present). Here the application is directly handling the
Coin vibration motors are designed to be easy to mount. communication with the interface. This can be changed to a
more convenient setup wherein the

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 IEEE International Conference On Recent Trends In Electronics Information Communication Technology, May 20-21, 2016, India

Fig. 4: A simplified model of the implementation

Interface could be a device in its own right, with embedded

controller, etc. and support for it is provided by the operating Fig. 5: The device
system of the host machine. This way, the device could benefit
from software developers having no knowledge/concern about
the underlying hardware. VI. CONCLUSION

IV. RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
Once the algorithm was designed and code written in
Python was dumped in the Raspberry Pi, the device was tested
for all alphanumeric characters by reading and writing. Then
we uploaded a text file in a device and asked a volunteer to
edit the file using the interface. The volunteer with unimpaired
vision was able to edit the text with the help of a Braille chart
we gave.
V. SOCIETAL IMPACTS
The approach presented in this work understands the
requirements of a blind person and strives towards improving
their means of communication. Although currently available
products serve the purpose, they remain out of bounds for
common people in developing countries where blindness
prevails more significantly, by virtue of their cost. As
mentioned in the abstract the device is aimed at benefiting
people who are visually impaired. It can enable such a
differently abled person to learn and to communicate normally
with other people without a sense of inferiority or
embarrassment.
This paper presents a novel concept of a reading-and-
writing assistive device, whose main motivation is to make e-
Books accessible to the visually impaired. The fundamental
idea behind developing this device is that visually impaired
people can only understand Braille script. There is very little
Braille literature available as compared to that of literature in
normal text. Thus, this device acts as a bridge between normal
text and Braille. The algorithm which we have used gives us
full control to make this device suitable for any language.
Moreover, with the knowledge and experience of the results
achieved so far we conclude that we can further enhance the
performance of the device by reducing power consumption.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank Prof. Lyla B. Das,
Dr. Sameer S.M. and Mr. Anandan of ECE department, NIT
Calicut for their valuable help in carrying out this project.

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REFERENCES

[1] International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

Available online at
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CESCR.aspx

[2] Robert N. Schmidt et al., ”Refreshable braille display system,

”U.S. Patent 6 354 839, March 12, 2002.

[3] H. Tehranchi et al.,”Reading aid for the blind”, in IEE Colloquium

on Image Processing for Disabled People, Edinburgh,1992.

[4] R. Velazquez and E. Pissaloux, The TactoBook: a portable

electronic tactile reading device for the blind, Proc. of 10th IFAC
Symposium on Analysis, Design, and Evaluation of Human-
Machine Systems, Seoul, Korea, 2007.

[5] A chart of Braille letters for reference Available online at

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Braille
alphabet.jpg

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