A Boston nonprofit is putting the finishing touches on the world's first affordable "tablet" for the blind, an Android-based device that is part of an innovative campaign to turn around a little-known literacy crisis among the visually impaired.
"If only 12 percent of children could read today, it'd be the biggest discussion in the world," said Brian A. MacDonald, the president of National Braille Press, located in the Fenway. "But because the blind are such a small population, it's not very well known."
Literacy among the blind has plummeted in the past four decades to that astonishing number — 12 percent — due in part to the lack of qualified Braille instructors in regular classrooms, the flipside of the mainstreaming movement.
MacDonald and his team of techies hope their Braille tablet for the blind — dubbed the B2G-20 — will fill this void, eventually leveling the playing field for a population increasingly mired in unemployment and poverty.
But what does a tablet for a blind person look like? For starters, it doesn't require a display screen. Instead, a 20-character text output field features tiny pins that pop up and down to form Braille letters. An eight-key standard Braille keyboard for data input lies above the display. The whole thing is about the size of a Kindle.
Designed by assistive technology pioneer Deane Blazie and hardware engineer Mike Romeo, both volunteers, the tablet runs the latest version of Android. It has speech recognition, GPS, Wi-Fi, cell service, optical text recognition and even a camera.
The speech recognition is linked to Braille tutorials that can help the user learn Braille. The camera is a real game changer. The user can take a picture of a sign or a menu to have it read back in Braille, or use it to double-check the color of a shirt they're about to wear.
"We're ready to start building a bunch of units," said Blazie, who came out of retirement to help MacDonald pro bono. "But we have budget problems."
The group has raised and spent $1 million already. They need $200,000 more to bring the device to market, where it likely will sell for under $2,500 — far less than any electronic Braille product ever. They are about to launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund the remainder of the project.
But what's perhaps most remarkable is what's next: The first 3-D graphic display tablet for the blind. The prototype, just weeks from completion, features a moving carriage that prints a refreshable display of Braille and raised images made up of tiny nickel-titanium pins. Again, money is the issue. When they hit the $1 million mark, a blind consumer conceivably could have it in two years.
"A lot of people have tried to make full-page Braille display devices," Blazie said. "Nobody has succeeded."
Seventy percent of blind adults are unemployed. One of these upcoming devices could change that.
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