Digital Reader: A New Approach to Modern Reading for the Visually Impaired

Visually impaired people often have difficulty reading documents. Current technologies support converting digital text documents into braille or audio for them to use. This product provides visually impaired people with more options for reading printed texts, such as books, at a relatively low cost compared to current braille displays available on the market. Software-hardware interactions will be the primary area of exploration for this research project. The product will first collect text from paper and, using Python algorithms, detect and convert the text into electronic signals. These signals will be transmitted through a USB-to-TTL adapter to power an electromagnet that displays braille. 3D printed structures will serve as the braille dots and braille brick during the display process, they will lift up due to the magnetic field which imitates a non-refreshable braille brick. The detected and final braille outputs will be compared with the original text to analyze the product’s validity. Data will be manually collected to calculate the detection accuracy. The product achieves its intended purpose while maintaining low usage costs, as some of the required materials are easily found in households