Over the years, however, those 63 characters got quickly gobbled up – through the addition of character-modification keystrokes, the total grew and now includes chemical, mathematical and other symbols.
#Blind write portable plus
These 63 characters are enough for a Western alphabet plus 10 numerical digits, with several left over for punctuation and some special characters. The blind read by feeling the bumps with their fingertips.Īs any computational mathematician will tell you, such a matrix yields two-to-the-sixth minus one variations, or 63 possible characters.
#Blind write portable code
Originally developed for the French military, Braille is a relatively simple code with each character made up of variations of six dots – or bumps, really – arranged in a 2-by-3 matrix. We developed a tablet Braille writer," said Dharmaraja, "A touchscreen for people who can't see."įirst, however, the student-mentor team had to learn Braille. "Your standard tablet has more capability at a tenth the price," said Duran. All for a device of limited functionality, beyond typing Braille, of course. There are devices that help the blind write Braille, to send email and so forth, but they are essentially specialized laptops that cost, in some cases, $6,000 or more. "What if you were on the street and needed to copy down a phone number? These are real challenges the blind grapple with every day." "Imagine being blind in a classroom, how would you take notes?" said Lew. "The killer app was not a reader, but a writer," said Dharmaraja. That is when they stumbled upon a sweet spot. "It was a nice-to-have, not a must-have," said Dharmaraja. "Plus, the technology, while definitely helpful, would be limited in day-to-day application." "How does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up? How does a blind person ensure proper lighting of the paper?" said Duran. While a Braille character reader would be helpful to the blind, Lew and Dharmaraja learned, there were logistics that were hard to get around. It became clear that there were bigger fish to fry. "It was a cool challenge, but not exactly where we ended up." Bigger fishĮven before Duran arrived for the summer, Lew and Dharmaraja began to talk to the Stanford Office of Accessible Education, people whose profession is helping blind and visually impaired students negotiate the world of higher learning. "Originally, our assignment was to create a character-recognition application that would use the camera on a mobile device – a phone or tablet – to transform pages of Braille into readable text," said Duran. His mentors were Adrian Lew, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Sohan Dharmaraja, a doctoral candidate at Stanford studying computational mathematics. Last June, he came to Stanford at the suggestion of one of his professors. He is now in his senior year at New Mexico State University. Army and several university and industry partners that makes up the AHPCRC.Īdam Duran is one such undergraduate, a student both lucky and good. The competition is made possible in part by a collaboration between the U.S. They compete, American Idol-style, for top honors at the end of the summer.
All are assigned mentors and tasked with a challenge. Some of the undergraduates are gathered into teams. (Photo: Steve Fyffe / Stanford News Service)Įach summer, under the red-tiled roofs and sandstone of Stanford, the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) invites a select group of undergraduates from across the country to gather for a two-month immersion into the wonders of advanced computing.
#Blind write portable install
All it takes is a button to control the entire system ! With this system, the blind user does not require the complexity of Braille machine to read a book. It also has the facility to store the images in their respective book folder, thereby creating digital backup simultaneously. The user also has the ability to pause the audio output whenever he desires.
The system uses OCR technology to convert images into text and reads out the text by using Text-to-Speech conversion.The system supports audio output via Speakers as well as headphone. Blind Reader overcomes the limitation of conventional Braille machine by making it affordable for the common masses. The Braille machines are expensive and as a result are not accessible to many. Blind Reader is a portable, low-cost, reading device made for the blind people.
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