We’ve won the “Best IT Innovation Award” from BASIS Softexpo

As a part of BASIS’s “IT Innovation Project”, 17 project was submitted for BASIS Softexpo 2010. Among of them, only 3 projects were selected. They were –

• 1. Braille Board
• 2. Bangla Text to Speech (TTS)
• 3. Bangla OCR

Both, Braille Board and Bangla TTS was awarded for “Best IT Innovation Award”.

About Our Project:

Title: Design and Development of PC Controlled Dynamic Braille Board.

Project Description:
Braille is a primary medium of reading and writing for people who are blind or have low vision. Although blind or visually impaired individuals are able to access print materials by using audio books or listening to a personal reader and can write by dictating to someone, many find that they can access information more quickly and perform tasks that involve reading or writing more efficiently using Braille.

In the workplace and at school, knowing Braille makes it possible for blind people to read and take notes independently, and it increases the amount of written material that is accessible to them. Teachers who are blind can use Braille for lecture notes. Studies have found that the employment rate for blind people who know Braille is higher than for those who don’t.

Each Braille Character, called “cell”, is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two columns of three dots each. A dot may be raised at any of the six positions to form sixty-four combination’s (including the combination in which no dots are raised).

How it works:

Whenever any input comes from the computer via serial port, the touch pad’s 6 pin comes out by the input character combination. By touching the pads pin, anyone can sense the character as a braille character. 16 character can be read at a time with this device.

Economic Impact:
The designed Braille board can be provided with a much cheaper price (2000-2500 taka), where each page use for printing Braille Book would be cost 5 taka. Thus printing a book with 200 pages may require 1000 taka. Thus by using the Braille Board, we may give access to huge amount of soft documents to the blind people. More over it can be interfaced with any Computer that can run DOS. Thus the System requirement for this Braille board is also very low. It helps the Visually Impaired to earn money.