BrailleBoard

Designing and developing a computer keyboard for the visually impaired

In a course on accessibility and universal design during my undergrad – I got to re-imagine computer keyboards for the blind. The existing design had braille characters printed on existing keys – were non intuitive and relied heavily on the typists muscle memory and accuracy.

My redesign was a pair of gloves. I mapped the six cells in a braille character to different fingers on each hand. Pressing a combination of these would result in a character being pressed and the audio feedback confirmed the same.

Prototyping was an exciting process for It was my first time designing the electronics for a device and working on an open-source environment as opposed to designing robots as a kid in closed environments.