BrailleGrid: Affordable Braille Display for Web Accessibility

BrailleGrid is a low-cost, open-source Braille display device aimed at improving digital accessibility for individuals with visual impairments. Commercial Braille displays can cost between $3,500 and $15,000, creating a major barrier to access. BrailleGrid addresses this by combining browser-based content translation with an electromechanical tactile display to deliver web content in Braille through custom hardware and a browser extension.

On the software side, the solution leverages a browser extension written in JavaScript to scrape and summarize webpage text. Using the OpenAI API, it condenses this text into digestible chunks before translating it into Braille characters. A Go-based terminal user interface (TUI) acts as a server that receives post requests and communicates with the physical display over serial.

The hardware system consists of solenoid-actuated Braille cells controlled by an Arduino and shift registers. Each Braille character is represented by a 6-dot configuration; to reduce I/O pin overhead, shift registers are used to scan rows and columns. This enables control of 30 solenoids (enough for 5 characters) using just 6 microcontroller pins, improving scalability and reducing complexity.

This project received the most innovative project award in IEEE Northwestern Technical Showcase 2024.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/mimiZhang130/braille-grid