Tanishq
@Tanishq

Hello! I'm Tanishq from a remote rural town in India, I'm always fascinated by the world and love solving problems with the skills I have.

Once I was in a state of deep thinking, wondering about how beautiful is our sense of vision, over the course of hundreds of millions of years, it evolved from a simple cell which could only detect difference between dark and light to such a system that the most powerful of supercomputers humans have ever made cannot rival the complexity of. And then I was struck with a thought, a thought so disheartening I cannot express in words. I had imagined how would it be being blind my entire life, a life without light and a life without vision, I couldn't even comprehend how much of this world would I never understand and how much dependent I would be.

I have a passion for knowledge and technology and to help others with it, since then, I focused my entire attention to solve a problem, which was, to help those who cannot even tell the difference between light and dark, help them learn and gain knowledge. So there my research began, and I thought 'There must be a lot of products already in the market to help the needy ones.' and there I met with my greatest of astonishment, Braille displays(A device which can convert a text file to a refresh-able braille dots) were priced at 3,000 US Dollars, I do not know who and why the maker of the product thought it to be a right price, here in India I have seen daily wage laborers working for hours and hours daily, and getting paid 400 INR (Less than 6 USD)a day, that too if they are lucky enough to find work.

But we are talking about people with almost or complete loss of vision, people who cannot even grind themselves like a daily wage laborer to earn money, and people who have to be partially or completely dependent on others, how could they even afford anything as ridiculously priced as the current electronic braille technologies in market?

That inspired me to work on a completely open source solution to the problem, and I have almost created a working prototype of a device which converts normal text into a Braille format, 'almost' because, the software is complete, and published but as the project contains electro-mechanical parts, I will need the help of certain tools(for actual working prototype) which I cannot afford, so I ask for your help.

Your help will be hearty appreciated.

I'll keep posting the updates and build instructions for the project on the following link--

https://hackaday.io/project/105109-text-reader-for-the-visually-impaired