Touchscreen Braille Writer Lets the Blind Type on a Tablet

One group of people has traditionally been left out of our modern tablet revolution: the visually impaired. Our slick, button-less touchscreens are essentially useless to those who rely on touch to navigate around a computer interface, unless voice-control features are built in to the device and its OS. But a Stanford team of three has helped change that. Tasked to create a character-recognition program that would turn pages of Braille into readable text on an Android tablet, student Adam Duran, with the help of two mentor-professors, ended up creating something even more useful than his original assignment: a touchscreen-based Braille writer. Currently a senior at New Mexico State University, Duran arrived at Stanford in June to take part in a two-month program offered by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC). “How does a blind person orient a printed page so that the computer knows which side is up? “The solution is so simple, so beautiful.

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