This week we focused on making sure our demo ran smoothly and began preparing for our user testing session next week. For the demo, we displayed a completed web-app integrated with the back-end and a working solenoid system with serial communication, which is how we will be communicating between hardware and software once we have integrated our system.
We are currently working on improving the front-end to ensure it is easy to use for completely blind users and clear for partially blind users. This process includes ensuring proper spacing between all of our buttons, testing our web-app’s features using text-to-speech to assess the clarity of our buttons, ensuring large text, and limiting the amount of text on a page while making sure our users understand the flow of our site. We currently have it running on a phone using a local-host and are looking into hosting it publicly for our demo.
We successfully integrated our front-end and back-end components, and we are currently in the process of integrating our software with our hardware. We have completed writing the American English text to braille algorithms and have converted our braille representation in software to signals that can be sent to the solenoids to emboss onto paper. We made slight modifications to the size of our solenoid encasing on our electromechanical embosser. This modification was to make the spacing between each solenoid 4 braille characters, which is a cleaner way to represent the braille in software. We also sent out our updated PCB to include our RPI->arduino modification. We are currently working on establishing communication between the RPI and the arduino and assembling the electromechanical embosser system.