Space Apps Challenge 2018

Motivation

Less than 1% of all printed text have Braille translation, due to the cost of the process.

However, every 5 seconds a new person is born or becomes blind and that rate is increasing worldwide. Today, there are 36 million blind people in the world and the projection for 2020 is for 125 million people. In spite of that, it is still very difficult to find accessible information. Although alternatives to interacting with online pages do exist, through audio for example, they are limited and troublesome.

With more access to information, more people could contribute to the development of solutions for world problems.

Our solution

In order to provide information in a easy, fairly unexpensive way, we came up with SeeTouch, a digital reader similar to kindle that uses the same e-ink technology in a creative way, in order to allow visually impaired people to see webpages as easily as you and me.

Our ideia is to modify the e-ink components in order to give them a smooth side and a rough side. That would create a different texture on the screen of the reader, allowing the convertion of text to Braille instantly and even the interpretation of images and graphs.

Relevance

This project provides a larger percentage of those 36 million people access to an enormous amount of data, including Nasa's, making it possible for more projects like the ones on Space Apps to be developed with more diversity and inclusion. Blind programmers would also benefit from this project since it would increase the speed in which they can understand the code and develop solutions.

Challenges faced

Our biggest challenge is modifying the spheres that form the e-ink in order to give them the shape we need and adapt the device for it.

Team

• Fábio Araújo - project leader, Computer Engineering student
• Fabrícia Diniz - project developer, Telematics student
• Francisco Marques - project designer, Telematics student

"Every person, every possibility, everything is possible."