Brailldle

Translates conventional text to Grade One braille on a refreshable braille cell

Comment

Inspiration

Reading is one of the most essential tools for people to gain information and form connections with the world. Imagine if the texts around you are in foreign languages that you cannot comprehend? This is the problem that many Braille readers face. Approximately 90% of children with blindness are also illiterate due to the accessibility barrier between visual text and braille. Our goal is to design an accessible and user-friendly braille translator for blind individuals to approach reading with ease, be it a manual or a poem.

Product Description

Brailldle is a refreshable braille display that shows live braille translation of texts from images.

User Instructions

  1. Through our interface, connect a camera to feed in the text data you want to translate.
  2. Click any keyboard button to capture an image.
  3. The braille display would translate the text letter by letter and refresh every 5 seconds.
  4. Place hand on braille cell to feel the dots.

How we built it

Mechanics

Brailldle Mechanics Breakdown

Sketch of Brailldle mechanics

The braille display is composited of 5 components:
  1. Pen push buttons: we figured that the pen push buttons are perfect as braille dots.
  2. Cell base (acrylic)
  3. Servo motor: each corresponds to a braille dot.
  4. Wooden rod
  5. Cam

In their resting position, the braille dots (pen push buttons) lay under the cell base. As each servo receives a signal to turn 180ยบ, it would turn the wooden rod connected to the cam. The cam would push the braille dot right on top of it past a hole in the cell base. Each letter would take 5 seconds to refresh.

Braille Cell

The braille cell consists of a body with all the mechanics and a case to store the body.

Braille Cell Body

CAD model for the body of the braille cell

Braille Case

CAD model for the case of the braille cell

Electrical and Programming

Circuit Diagram

Circuit diagram for the servos

Through a camera, we can acquire the image of text. Using Pytesseract, we extract the text from the image and run our Arduino file, which converts the text to braille and regulates servos to raise dots on our braille cell.

Pseudocode

Pseudocode

Our Journey

1. Challenges we ran into

  • Grainy camera
  • Servos loop does not terminate (Arduino//servo error)
  • Interface error (Camera not showing//Tkinter)

2. Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Early idea forming and realistic planning
  • Using a camera to read text
  • Teamwork, delegation

3. What we learned

  • Pytesseract
  • Tkinter
  • Arduino configuration

What's next for Brailldle

Our braille translator is the start of the many ideas that we wanted to do to aid blind individuals during our discussions. Brailldle can either develop to have multiple refreshable cells to translate Grade Two braille, which is more common and convenient to read. We also talked about glasses that scan conventional texts and translate them to a braille display. As a group, we hope to develop products that people with blindness can easily integrate into their everyday movements.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates