haptic braille by Kilhyun Baek from korea

This project aimed to suggest a way for visually challenged people to get updates of printed materials fast and easy just like any other people.

We get a lot of new information daily from printed materials such as newspaper, magazines, fictions and letters. The daily updates of new information are invaluable to people living in the fast-changing modern society. It occurs to me, then, what it is like for people with visual impairment. Through research and survey, daily newspapers, magazines or the newest fictions are just a bunch of papers to them. They can read only what comes in Braille. There are newspapers, magazines or books published in Braille, but the quantity is way small. Publishing letters in Braille is time and money consuming. What is worse, Braille publishing takes time, so by then the material will have lost its up-to-dateness. As a designer, I started considering a new concept of communication device for them.

Haptic Braille is a new communication device for people with visual impairment. It is a mouse-type portable Braille translator and scanner: It scans any printed materials, recognizes the characters via OCR and translates them into the Braille on the surface of the device. Reading with fingertips inspired the mouse shape, which is the same way that the blind read the Braille. it is convenient to carry so that it can be used anywhere, anytime.