Smart braille Reading and Writing Devices

Ethiopia is believed to have one of the world’s highest rate of blindness and low vision. national
survey on blindness and low vison done in 2008 revealed that the national prevalence of
blindness is 1.6% and low vison is 3.7% of the population. according to the survey, there are
1.28 million blind people and another 2.96 million people with low vision.

Unfortunately, only few people with blindness get proper education and get the chance to use
braille to read and write. Because our country hasn’t developed an easy system for visual
impaired peoples to learn and to develop their own skill especially they have very rare access to
use technology device and also the devices available are very expensive and are not easy to use.
In addition, those people that have proper education use manual writing and reading. There are
only few resources that have been translated into braille and they couldn’t get the chance to cop
up with modern technology and the get information within it.

Visually impaired people face difficulties in interacting and gaining full advantage of computers
and technologies. Recently, and with the fast evolution in technology, researchers proposed to
give the blinds the ability to take advantage of these advancements. Accordingly, this paper
introduces a new communication channel for visually impaired people. This project introduces
simple design for a braille, comprising a design aims to produce a device that perform mild
vibrations in six finger of visual impaired person. It includes a two-way communication system
that convert a braille letter and characters into digitalized form (text file) and the reverse that
converts a text into a braille system using a six vibrator motor that represent braille dots which
the blind person can recognize. it also used a sound to assisted the visual impaired individual.