UV ink-jet printed braille: a review on the state of the art
Igor Majnaric unizg.academia.edu
UV ink-jet printed braille: a review on the state of the art
Multilayer UV ink-jet is recognized as alternative printing technology to traditional embossing, thermo-forming, screen-printing and other Braille printing techniques. Advantages of multilayer printing are extensive possibilities of dot shape and dot height modulation according to the requirements of blind and visually impaired people associations and legislation. Braille used for the pharmaceutical packaging is prescribed according to EU Directive 2004/27/EC, cell and dot dimensions are specified in the Standard EN 15823, in other fields there are only recommendations and specifications in force. Braille is usually adapted to different users, languages, scope, media, and printing processes. A set of samples with different Braille text sizes using conventional rounded dot shape and alternative dot shapes with additional small raised dot over basic dot, dots with incision and other dot shapes were prepared using multilayer UV ink-jet printing technique. Cell and dot dimensions and sh...

Braille printers are the most convenient way to emboss the texts on a Braille paper. But existing embossers are multiple times more expensive than the normal printers. In this paper, an innovative design of a low cost Braille printer is presented. The design being not dependent on expensive tools is an efficient solution. In the proposed Braille system, major concentration is given to develop the actuators which emboss the impressions on the Braille paper to make dots to decode text language in Braille format. Unlike conventional mechanisms, gear DC motors are utilised to design efficient and inexpensive actuators. Additionally, the overall printing system involves cost efficiently designed interdependent components, such as customised printing software, wireless communication system, sensing mechanisms, and compact mechanical setup. Extensive testing under different conditions is carried out and it is found that the proposed design can provide satisfactory embossing performance at a very low cost.

Generally, user interface is improved by considering only normal people, however this improvement affects reversely on blind people. Currently available systems are either used by normal person or blind person therefore there is a need of such system which will provide a common interface to blind as well as normal person. Now here we can use Braille Printer to provide such common interface. Braille is an important language used by the visually impaired to read and write. It is vital for communication and educational purposes. Braille Printer takes an input as a speech through microphone which is then converted to text using speech recognition and the recognized text is embossed in its respective Braille code. Here speech is the way of common interface through which blind person as well as normal person can interact with our system. Keywords — Braille, Braille Code, Speech Recognition

The main goal of our study was to investigate the compliance of existing books in Slovenia for children who are blind or visually impaired with known requirements and standards. As an alternative we have prepared test pages from the book Mali princ (The Little Princ, by A. Saint Exupery) using UV inkjet printing technique. Results of the analyses were made by legibility and suitability tests based on interviews, made with 11 blind children and their teachers. It was concluded form the results that respondents (children) found Braille text in almost all the samples unlegible. But not all results were bad ; our analysis confirmed the suitability of UV-inkjet printing technology for printing Braille. The number of samples and involved blind persons with Braille literacy was not high enough to get statistically valid answers and confirmations, however it was evident that even blind children that are not perfect Braille users can use good UV printed Braille text.

Visually impaired people have to deal with various challenges since they cannot see anything with their eyes and even some visually impaired people are not able to read the content of their interest so they fail to gain knowledge from reading as much as a normal person can obtain. Visually impaired people have some content available in the braille format that they can read but not all content of their reading interest is available in the braille format. Therefore, braille embosser will help to make available the maximum content of their reading interest in the braille format at an affordable cost. In this project, the user will have to upload an image of blinds reading interest, which is to be converted in the braille format. Initially, we will extract the text from a text image and save the text file using different image processing techniques. Then each character stored in the text file will be converted to the respective braille format using ASCII values and then converted text will be embossed using the braille embosser, which will make the content available for the blind community.