DRISHTI- A Gesture controlled Text to Braille Converter

Vineeth Kartha1, Dheeraj S. Nair1 1 Department of Electrical Ans Electronics Engineering, Govt. Engineering College, Barton Hill ABSTRACT The need for devices for aiding the physically challenged has been on demand. A text to Braille converter is intended to aid the blind to interact with computers at workplaces and homes. Though several such devices are available, the cost is a limiting factor. Here we introduce a low cost gesture controlled device that enables blind to read through files in digital formats like .txt, .doc pdf etc. As the Braille pages are rather thick and contain fewer words, a normal printed book turns out to be a voluminous Braille text. The Braille printing system is very expensive, and use of text to speech synthesizers is inefficient in noisier environments. These problems, coupled with the tremendous urge of the blind people to have educational support, form the basic motivating factor to develop a low cost Braille Reading System, which can at least partially alleviate some of these difficulties. Here we introduce a braille display that uses six solenoids to form a braille cell. It works on the similar principle of a dot matrix printer where depending on each character a pattern is formed by raised and lowered solenoids. A laptop touchpad is used to navigate through the documents. The device is made cheap by using a single braille cell and with open source developing tools. The project was tested and display at speeds of approximately 108 words per minute were obtained. The use of piezoelectric Braille cell will further improve speed of the device and also reduce the power consumption. Presently only plain text files can be read, but research and work is going on to read other formats like doc, pdf, odt. Also research is being done to integrate memory cards to the device so that the user can read documents on memory cards. Keywords braille, gesture, digital format files, Visual Imparement