For blind people in today’s increasingly digital classrooms and workplaces, access to information is limited by the shortcomings of current assistive technologies. To gain meaningful access to information, many blind people rely on tactile content—information accessed through fingertips—namely multiline braille text and tactile graphics. Just as with written text, multiline braille text provides spatial cues like indentations, paragraph headings, and section breaks that are essential to understanding written content. And just as with images, tactile graphics allow a blind person to interpret graphs, maps, spreadsheets, diagrams and other forms of information coded in geometric patterns and spatial layouts.
However, current assistive technology solutions, including audio tools and single-line braille displays, do not support digital versions of these essential large-area tactile formats. And so blind people are still heavily reliant on hardcopy braille and tactile graphics, which are expensive and bulky ($5-10 per page of embossed braille, up to $50k for a textbook), and do not provide the immediacy of access to information needed in the increasingly digital world.
Blind students and adults need on-the-fly access to digital information, in a classroom environment, at work, and at home. Traditional forms of hardcopy content are not meeting their needs in the modern digital world. Neither are single line braille devices that only provide a narrow window for accessing digital information and do not support access to essential content like collaborative documents, worksheets, and textbooks and materials like maps, graphs, spatial math code, and diagrams.
Our goal is to develop large-area braille and tactile graphics products that meet the needs of blind computer users in the modern digital world.
Not only will multiple lines of braille text enable faster reading, it will preserve the layout, spacing, indentations, and other formatting cues that contextualize information. Multiple lines will also give access to other forms of spatial information such as musical notation, mathematics and spreadsheets.
Real-time access to tactile graphics, such as bar charts, XY-plots, graphs, and diagrams, is essential for information access in the modern digital world. Tactile graphics will come to life through a touch-sensing interface, enabling blind computer users to create, edit and interact with spatial content.
While tools exist for creating embossed and raised-line maps, none are available on-demand in real time, which represents a huge accessibility barrier for blind people. Our product will allow quick access to tactile representations of surroundings for navigation.
A large-area refreshable display will enable touch-mediated interaction with digital information akin to interaction with modern graphical user interfaces. The product will simplify digital interaction by helping to preserve the spatial layouts of websites and other forms of spatial digital content.
