Digital tablets offer access to a world of information, but there is no elegant and efficient model, at affordable prices, for people with visual impairments. This is because current braille tablets only offer a very small reading space for only one line of text, row by row. Researchers at the University of Michigan, led by Brent Gillespie, Alex Russomanno, Mark Burns, and Sile O'Modhrain, hope to commercialize a tablet with an updatable display to translate an entire page at once.
The idea of the project was O'Modhrain, who is a visually impaired person, who says: "Existing displays do not allow access to a lot of braille code and graphic information" "The math and music codes, for example, are displayed spatially, so that they are distributed over several lines."
The existing technology could allow the investment for a braille screen for reading on an entire page, but the price would be astronomical. For example, single-line displays that rely on electronics cost more than $3.000; expanding them to a full page could potentially raise the price, up to $55.000. To reduce this cost, the team chose to do the microfluidic device.
This tablet called "HOLY BRAILLE"candidates this year for the title of "Best invention of the year".
