Text2Touch | Devpost

Text2Touch

Inspiration

After considering what hackathon project to pursue, our team, JAKT, encountered a common obstacle that visually impaired individuals face: their struggle with interacting with technology and our dynamic society. While there are existing solutions, they are expensive, bulky, and therefore inaccessible to many. Text2Touch is our take on the Braille Display combining our implementation of the Braille Display through computer text & computer vision. This versatility, along with its accessibility, is what we would like to bring to the community in hopes of providing the visually impaired with a new, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly way of interacting with our dynamic world.

What it does

Text2Touch takes a screen's text, downloads as a txt file, and parses the text into serial data that then is sent over to an Arduino and reinterpreted as braille.

How we built it

Our initial plan was to 3D print the parts that make up the electromagnets' chassis. However, our parts (as of 10:26 AM), have not been printed yet. Thus, we utilized aluminum cans, recycled cardboard, and clean paper food wrappings to create our ECO-FRIENDLY prototype of the braille display.

We split off to tackle the firmware, hardware and software components of this project. Our firmware was coded on the Arduino IDE, our hardware was glued, taped, soldered, and tested to completion, and our software was programmed with Python and Javascript. In the end, we came together to debug and combine our efforts into a tangible prototype that we're extremely excited to share!

Challenges we ran into

There were many setbacks involving the hardware, chassis construction, and library utilization in our software. However, we tried to do the best we could through our dedicated teamwork and debugging efforts.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we utilized relays to construct our electromagnets, that we persevered with our chassis despite the lack of technical and inventory limitations, and that we were able to accomplish the volume of work in 24 hours.

What's next for Text2Touch

We want to refine Text2Touch to create a seamless user experience. We will do so by possibly implementing text-to-speech, refining our camera-to-touch feature, and improving the interactions between our Chrome Extension, the Arduino, and the Text2Touch Braille Display.