Is it possible to create e-books for visually impaired people?
July 28, 2018 | 18:37 |3900
In 1824, Louis Braille created a unique relief-point tactile system of reading and writing for use by the blind or visually impaired. His system remains virtually unchanged to this day, and is known worldwide simply as braille. Since then, Braille has been actively introduced into printing technology. Due to the fact that now most of the information exists in electronic form, many IT companies are working on the creation of electronic books for the blind and visually impaired. The history of high-grade readers (e-books) for the blind and visually impaired began in 2009. Prior to this, electronic readers through a complex mechanism displayed one line of text and cost fabulous money. In 2009, the Korean company Yanko Design proposed a concept device, the surface of which to raise braille dots on a display due to the use of electroactive polymers (EAP). EAP is a technology that can dynamically change the surface pattern by way of an electromagnetic signal – simulating braille text. Not exactly a new idea but a nice executive nonetheless.Altyn ASHYROVA
In 2013, the Yanko Design team created a British prototype design for e-book called “Anagraphs”. A braille e-book is a refreshable braille display heated wax rather than mechanical pins to raise braille dots on a display. The elastic screen reproduced the letters from the braille alphabet by point heating the paraffin in the tanks directly under the display.
Dramaticallyly heated, paraffin expanded and hardened, forming a convex point on the screen. To remove the symbol, paraffin heated more slowly, which caused it to melt and drain back into the tank. Then the process was repeated. Users who tested Anagraphs called it “Holy Grail” for people with visual impairments. But funding from the European Union ran out before it could be brought to production.
Another contribution to the promotion of the idea of an e-books for blind and visually impaired people was made by the Australian company Blitab. The first-ever braille tablet has been developed, using a new liquid-based technology to create tactile relief outputting braille, graphics and maps for the blind and partially sighted.
Their prototype consists of two parts. The bottom part is a normal Android-based tablet. It has a corresponding technology that allows text files to be instantly converted into braille from USB sticks, web browsers or NFC tags.
The second screen works on the basis of microfluidics. The Blitab tablet uses liquid bubbles to instantly generate braille text or relief images. Tactile relief is created instantly through small liquid bubbles on the screen. The technology is quite scalable, so it can output images and put any tactile relief representation like maps and graphics, such as geometric figures, in order to serve as an educational tool for blind people.
The next step on the way to e-readers for the blind was done by the researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences who developed a framework to encode memory, in the form of Braille-like dimples and bumps, onto a blank, lattice-free material.
The idea is as follows. First, the thin elastic shell – shaped like a slightly curved ruler – is compressed by a force on each end. Then, indents are made using a simple stylus, in much the same way that the pages of a traditional Braille book are printed. The shell will “remember” the indent when the force is no longer applied and the indent can be erased by stretching the shell back out.
As Lakshminayaranan Mahadevan, one of the authors of the study notes, Braille templates can be easily added and deleted. “Simple experiments with cylindrical and spherical shells show that we can control the number, location, and the temporal order of these dimples which can be written and erased at will,” said Mahadevan.
This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated mechanical memory in a system with no inherent lattice. The approach is also scale-independent, meaning it will work with one-atom-thick graphene all the way up to paper. Researchers have only to decide how to control the content of each page, as well as to ensure a quick “erasure” and reproduction of the next set of characters.
Meanwhile, the market for electronic books for blind and visually impaired people is an unoccupied niche. Printed versions of such books for publishers are unprofitable due to high expenditures and high prime cost at low demand.
“Talking” books are also difficult to create, as well as to translate into other languages. Let us have a big hope that soon one of the world’s IT companies will create a revolutionary technology which to output braille in a completely new and innovative way, so visually impaired people from around the world will have almost unlimited access to information.
