Text to Braille Converting Communication Device forthe Visual and Hearing Impaired Persons

Abstract

Communication plays a vital role in expressing one's feeling to another. People with vision and hearing impairment, find it difficult to communicate with one another. There are certain unique languages available for the deaf-blind people which includes tactile signing, Braille, moon etc. Among these methods, the most commonly preferred means of communication is Braille. Braille is a system developed to assist the visually and hearing-impaired person by creating arrangements of dots which form letters, numbers and punctuation marks. This paper proposes a communication device model which converts any alphanumeric English text to its corresponding Braille format that can be read by a Deaf-Blind person. An abled person can send a message to a Deaf-Blind person from his mobile phone. Once the message is received by the device, it starts converting the letters in the message to Braille format. The Braille characters are displayed one by one using a Braille display consisting of six vibration motors depicting the six dots in a Braille cell representation. The Deaf-Blind person can feel the characters by placing their palm on the Braille display unit. This paper also includes a vibration band model for the Deaf-Blind person, which acts as an indicator for an incoming message.