Women Power: Revolutionizing The Braille System For The Visually-Impaired

Six female students at the MIT School of Engineering dreamed of inventing a device that would revolutionize the education system for blind people and those with visual problems. The task was to find a way to immediately translate into Braille printed text such as those found in books and other reading materials.

The women, known as "Team 100% Enthusiasm", encountered a lot of snags on their way to completing the MakeMIT hackaton. They only had 15 hours to complete the project but challenges kept coming their way. Among these are the laser-cutting the wrong casing material, lining up for the 3D printers and problems with the software needed to optically recognize the text and translate them into Braille.

Charlene Xia, one of the members of the team, said everything is turning out harder than they initially thought. Despite the challenges, they came up with a crude working prototype of the device 15 minutes before the deadline, according to Mashable. The device, now known as Tactile, earned the girls first place in the contest.

The team who has since been renamed as Team Tactile have made a distinct name for women in the field of technology and have received praises for their invention one year after the hackaton, as per Yahoo. They are looking forward to more hard work to make Tactile available in the market but for now, they are content to look back at how they came up with the invention. It all started when a teammate saw a Braille watch and then the rest is history.

The girls searched for available gadgets in Google and were amazed to see a similar technology priced from $3,000 to $15,000, according to Forbes. The existing technology is expensive but the team envisions their device to look as small as a candy bar with an affordable price of only $100. Tactile works by somehow scanning the printed text and with the use of a microcontroller translate it into Braille. With the harder part over, the girls are now looking for an app that will provide easy connection between Tactile and the user's smartphones.