iPad app brings braille keyboard to blind users’ fingertips

The proliferation of touchscreen technology may have revolutionized mobile computer input for almost everyone, but there’s one sector of the population that isn’t exactly feeling the pinch, the tap, or the swipe: the blind. It’s nearly impossible to interact with elements on a totally smooth screen if you can’t see. But iBrailler Notes, which began as a summer project at Stanford University in 2011 and is now available as a stand-alone app for iOS, aims to offer blind and vision-impaired iPad users an easy way to type Braille notes and perform basic word processing on a touchscreen.

Now they can use an iPad and they’re the cool kid. They have the coolest technology in the classroom.

Ed Summers, a blind computer scientist with business analytics software firm SAS, who says visually impaired students usually use tools that make them stick out like a sore thumb in class

This isn’t the first smartphone app commercially available to the visually impaired. But what iBrailler does differently is position its touch keyboard underneath the user’s fingertips, no matter where they set them on the iPad’s slick glass display. Every time you lift and readjust your hands on the screen, the keyboard does too. The keyboard uses Braille English Grade 1, Grade 2, and Six-Dot Computer Braille, and features built-in gestures for tasks like cutting, copying, and pasting text. Sohan Dharmarajah, one of iBrailler Notes’ creators, says feedback for iBrailler Notes thus far has been overwhelmingly positive; the app is being used actively at several blind schools and institutes in the United States and in Sri Lanka. An Android version is also in the works and should be available soon.

Technology