Electronic Braille pad

A low cost Braille pad is developed for enabling the visually impaired people to read text document from personal computer by means of tactile perception. Tactile sensation is one of the most important sensory functions along with the auditory sensation for the visually impaired person since it replaces the visual sensation of the person with sight. Braille is a tactile system of raised dots representing alphabets, symbols and numerical. Combination of raised dots represents a character. Braille pad consists of 6 Braille cells each cell has 8 dots. Each Braille cell is actuated by 36V solenoids, which has fast magnetization and demagnetization property and posses good torque. The height of the dot is controlled by a solenoids present underneath. Visual Basic (VB) is used as front-end tool. Variety of specialized user interaction features such as, cursor location, routing buttons, file selection, increment and decrement of reading speed is done through VB. It provides direct access to information on the computer screen. Also speech synthesizer is used to spell out each text.