With smartphone innovations going for thinner phones with humongous screens, the usability of such devices has taken a hit. It is at this juncture that Sumit Dagar,post graduate from National Institute of Design(NID), started a project which will allow blind people to read SMS’s and emails on their smartphones by converting text into Braille patterns.
Dagar said to Times of India on the project that:
We have created the world's first Braille smartphone. This product is based on an innovative 'touch screen' which is capable of elevating and depressing the contents it receives to transform them into 'touchable' patterns.
His company is being incubated at Indian Institute of Management(IIM), Ahmedabad and the project which is 3 years in the making is being assisted by Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Delhi.
How it works?
The smartphone uses revolutionary Shape Memory Alloy technology, based on the concept that metals remember their original shapes. The phone thus has has a grid of pins on its display, which move up and down as required. The grid thus represents a Braille display, where pins come up to represent a character or letter. This screen which is the linchpin of the project will be able to elevate or depress the contents to form patterns in Braille. Rest everything will work like any other smartphone.
