Bridge2Africa Braille Display

Meeting Time

Wednesday 6PM

Project Description

Bridge2Africa program, in partnership with ASU students, seeks to solve the problem of the non-blind-friendly nature of internet browsing. The internet is a fantastic education tool due to its abundance of information; however, it is mainly accessible and easy to use for sight-based users. Blind students have more difficulties taking advantage of these resources, putting them at a deficit from other non-blind students.  

The primary community partner is Bridge2Africa, a South Africa-based non-profit organization in Johannesburg. This organization seeks to empower communities by increasing their access to technology to create a more educated and modern workforce in South Africa. This institution connected the team with the Prinshof School for Partially Sighted and Blind to be our secondary partner. The school currently uses refreshable braille displays and braille keyboards, but they do not have an excellent method to ease access to the internet for blind students.  This EPICS team targets the current gap by engineering solutions to bridge the existing deficiencies.  

The proposed solutions by the team consist of braille displays, braille transcription, screen readers, and more. It includes an HTML parser to identify text available on web pages. ASU team members successfully created a prototype of this parser and physical prototype models using LEDs and solenoids to represent the transcription of individual braille letters. 

The goal for this project is to develop a solution to facilitate blind students’ internet access, an international right stated by the United Nations. The students of ASU will work actively to finish the project and hopefully give these students the necessary instruments to accomplish this right and further use it as an educational tool to expand their opportunities.  

Future tasks include improvements in the UI design to be user-friendly. Explore transitioning to Django libraries so it could be escalated and can access and work from the cloud. Print testing PCB for two characters to verify the prototype follows accordingly the signals were sent. Once the verification and testing pass successfully, the design will calculate the measurements and dimensions needed for the electrical side of the project so the housing can start building their case to deliver our final product.