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Embossing in Linux with the Mountbatten Braille Writer

I happen to have a Mountbatten Learning System electronic brailler. In addition to its “typewriter” mode, the Mountbatten can be used as a PC Braille embosser, and even supports basic tactile graphics. There has never been a Linux driver published for it, but I got it working using a USB serial adapter. This script will let you emboss a text or BRF file if you have such an adapter, using the Mountbatten’s rear serial port.

Use this audio bubble level for your DIY projects

My friend Ron is blind and does a lot of carpentry and DIY work. One challenge he ran into is the need for an accessible level for putting up shelves and the like. So I put together web-based audio level that uses the orientation sensor in your phone or tablet.

The level is designed to be used with the screen up and the back of your device against the plane you’re trying to level. Orient your device so the long axis is parallel to the direction you want to level, with the top end of the screen on the left. In this orientation the level will play high-tone beeps when leaning to the left, and low-tone beeps when leaning to the right.As you get closer to the horizontal position, the beeps will become less frequent, going down to one beep per second at a 1 degree angle, before becoming silent. This way you can get feedback as you align a workpiece. If you are more than 15 degrees off in either direction you’ll hear a continuous tone.

There is also a short link pointing to this page: bit.ly/blevel.

You can 3D print this tactile graphics slate

Most Braille embossers can produce low-resolution tactile graphics by reducing the space between adjacent lines and character cells, making it possible to emboss continuous lines of dots. But designing these graphics is a tedious process because you get no incremental tactile feedback until you emboss them. It would be nice to have something more tactile to work with when prototyping the graphics, before inputting them into the software.

I designed a 3D printable Braille slate that lets you create this kind of tactile graphic manually. To my knowledge, it’s the only Braille slate that has embossing holes “in between” the rows and columns of the cells.

Introducing the BrailleBit - a simple Braille cell for Arduino projects

For months I’ve been carefully refining a mechanical Braille cell project, and it’s now ready for you to build. Say hello to the BrailleBit!

This project has very modest goals:

1. Provide a single cell of standard-size Braille output
2. Be very simple to assemble by Blind or sighted people
3. Be made of cheap parts
4. Be easy to control with Arduino or other microcontrollers

Let's make circuit diagrams accessible: Part 3

This is part of a series of posts on automatically generating circuit descriptions. In part 1, I wrote about the problem I’m trying to solve by converting circuits to text. Part 2 describes where we can get some example circuits. Today we’re going to take a look at the fruits of my labor so far. Example circuits Here are a few Fritzing projects automatically described by the program I’m working on: Let's make circuit diagrams accessible: Part 3 full article

Let's make circuit diagrams accessible: Part 2

In the last post we looked at different ways to represent the information that’s usually presented in a circuit diagram, also called a schematic. The goal is to start automatically converting existing circuit designs into a form that’s accessible to blind people. But before we can produce such an output, we need to get the circuit information into a format that our program can understand. Reading schematics from images My first impulse is to see if we can read schematic images directly, since an image is the most common way that circuits are shared online. Let's make circuit diagrams accessible: Part 2 full article

Let's make circuit diagrams accessible: Part 1

Let’s say you’re a blind hobbyist who’s into electronics. You look online for project ideas, but 99% of circuit designs are provided as an image. That’s completely useless with a screen reader. Here’s what a circuit diagram (also called a schematic) looks like:

If you have a Braille embosser that supports images, you might be able to enlarge the schematic, emboss it, and feel it. Chances are you don’t though - graphical embossers cost thousands of dollars, and even if you had one most graphics aren’t easy to feel when directly embossed. What you need is a textual description of the circuit that your PC can read to you.

Generating accessible pinouts

Motivation Lately I’ve been working on projects to support blind people who are interested in “maker” hobbies like electronics. There are blind ham radio operators and electronics hobbyists, and at least one professional blind electrical engineer. While electronics could be a great pursuit for more blind people, there are many barriers. As a sighted person, I have access to a huge number of interesting resources to teach myself how to build projects, but almost all of them rely on vision to convey vital information. Generating accessible pinouts full article