Nearly 32.2 million Americans above the age of 18 suffer from serious vision loss. Due to limited amenities for disabled people, those who suffer from vision loss can lose their ability to lead independent lives much faster than their peers. Although there exist features such as braille on bathroom signs, text to speech, auditory cues at crosswalks, and braille keyboards, blind people are still missing easy access to printed information. From reading recipes for packaged food to quickly jotting down a grocery list, it is important to give blind people quick access to this information at their fingertips.
Currently, braille printers can cost up to $2000 and it is not possible to print wirelessly from a phone. Further, computers are highly involved for blind users to access and not nearly as convenient as accessing information from a phone. In addition, it is not always optimal to bring expensive technology, such as braille keyboards, into the kitchen or to the grocery store.
For our project, we will be building a braille embosser that a user can connect to directly from their phone through a web-app! This web app will allow the user to either input notes (i.e. grocery list, phone number, to-do list) or a boxed recipe they would like to make (i.e. Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuit Mix, Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge Cake). The notes feature of our website will allow users to print whatever chunk of text they like. The recipe feature will generate the exact recipe as listed on the box, and will print the nutritional information, ingredients list, and directions.
Through this project, we hope to give blind users ease of access to information without having to go through tedious and expensive processes of printing to a braille printer from a computer, writing out the braille themselves, or using braille displays!