If only 12% of the children could read today, would be more discussion in the world.
sentence said by the president of the National Braille Press, Brian A. MacDonald has been a criticism of one of the biggest problems that is affecting people with visual disabilities : lack of literacy , who has just fallen to a dismal 12% from these people, so Brian concluded:
But because the blind are such a small population, this problem goes unnoticed
Following this, MacDonald and his team in Boston are finishing polish a tablet that aims, through an innovative campaign, fight for literacy of blind people, thanks to the first tablet Braille for the blind , called B2G-20. With this project intended to reduce unemployment and poverty, increasingly intense in this sector of the population.
A priori, it seems a difficult concept to understand (a tablet for the blind), but the key is that it is a tablet the size of a Kindle not require a screen Display . Instead, a text field of 20 characters with points of nickel and titanium that can come and go allow form Braille letters . 8 standard keyboard keys allow data entry device.
This ambitious project has been designed by Deane Blazie (pioneer in assistive technology) and Mike Romeo (hardware engineer) voluntarily.
tablet running the latest version of Android, counting among its specifications with voice recognition, GPS, WiFi, camera, optical text recognition … but most of them designed to take a step further:
- Speech recognition is linked to tutorial Braille, so that we can even learn Braille
- camera lets you take a picture of a symbol or a menu to read in Braille, for example
Everything looks great but what are the drawbacks? To Blazie the main problem is budget . His team has already raised and spent a million dollars, but now need additional $ 200,000 to bring the device to market. As a last resort, they are about to launch a campaign crowdfunding on Kickstarter to fund such amount and to bring this device to market, for less than $ 2500 per unit.
Still
have already thought of the evolution of the project, looking to get the first tablet showing 3D graphics for the blind , which is only a few weeks of completion. This version of the project, will carry a portable cart that prints a refreshable Braille display and for building these images with the same type of lifting points of the original project. But again, the problem is the budget. Need another million dollars within two years put it on sale in the market.
Apart from these projects, others also aim to make life easier as far as possible to the blind. Free On Android we have analyzed some applications that have been published for this purpose, but there are others designed to improve accessibility also. A simple example is the case of My Taxi App , an application to provide any information on taxis, making use of programs VoiceOver and TalkBack , enables the blind handle this application autonomously.
But we can still go further. Droiders , a Spanish company located in Murcia, has used Google Glass to take another step in helping the blind, developing your project Glass Blind, which has led to Glassters OCR application , which recognizes texts, and read the user through glasses . Sound is vibration transmitted to the inner ear, so that the user receives the reading personally. Furthermore promise language translation and object recognition in future updates .
Accessibility is untapped on the Android (and mobile in general) universe and, of course, we are proud to read about this type of project for the total integration of people. Also, is of even greater satisfaction to see from Spain also is innovating in this regard. Is it not our duty to get all the technological advances around the world? What do you think?
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