Bargain Braille

To help provide a low-cost communication tool for blind people, undergraduates at The John Hopkins University have invented a lightweight, portable Braille writing device that requires no electronic components.

For a class called Engineering Design Project, four mechanical engineering students were asked to produce such an instrument that would cost less than $50 each. The more sophisticated and generally more cumbersome typewriter-style or computer-based Braille writers available to blind people typically cost much more.

At the end of a two-term research, design and testing process, the student inventors came in well below the target price. They estimated that their Braille writer, if mass-produced, would cost about $10 each in an easy-to-assemble kit. The team members recently presented their prototype to the project's sponsor, the Baltimore- based US National Federation of the Blind.

‘We were looking for a portable writing device that's low-tech and does not use a computer,’ said Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, who has tried out the prototype. ‘We want to give credit to these students. They did an outstanding job. This was definitely a good proof-of-concept.’