Kazi Ragib Ishraq Sanim

Because of the high price of the refreshable Braille displays available in the market, most blind people don’t have the luxury to use those to read ebooks. This was the main motivation behind making a refreshable braille display that would be affordable for blind people from all classes. I came up with an idea of hacking magnetic relays to turn them into cheap actuators (under 0.25 USD) to actuate the braille dots. This actually brought down both the size and the cost of the device.

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My team and I also developed a new interactive Braille learning method by combining tactile sensing and text-to-speech for blind children. This was done with the help of a speech synthesizer module in Python. The device became the champion of the Energy Innovation Challenge 2018 in Singapore under the university category.

In the second version of this device, it was made even smaller by using smaller relays and standard braille cell size was achieved. But later, a study conducted by us revealed that the standard size isn’t always suitable for learning. This is because children have different levels of tactile perception. Therefore, for different users, different size of braille cells are required. So we came up with a novel design where the cell size could be made larger or smaller while keeping the aspect ratio constant. With this new version, we successfully tested the effectiveness of Braille teaching with different cell sizes for different students. The results of this study have been discussed in detail in the paper “Refreshable Braille Display with Adjustable Cell Size for Learners with Different Tactile Sensitivity” which has been accepted to the IEEE Transactions on Haptics.