Although the way we read printed or written text hasn't changed much over the last 600 years, the media used for carrying the words have evolved significantly. From animal skin and waxed wooden plaques to paper, and from there to LCD screens and e-ink, there’s now a wide choice of extremely affordable reading devices that can be used everywhere. Thanks to this, there’s virtually no limit in the selection of books to read, both in digital and physical form.

Well, that's how things work for sighted people, anyway. For the blind, getting to read a book of their choice could be much more complicated matter.

While you can buy a Kindle for a mere £50 these days, the average refreshable braille display costs anywhere from 20 to 40 times as much. In addition to that, most braille displays can only show one line of text up to 40 characters in length.

Braille fact #1 Braille is effectively an improved version of a French military code called "night writing." Created by Charles Barbier in the 19th century, night writing was quite complicated for soldiers to work with, as it used cells of 12 embossed dots that represented sounds instead of letters. Louis Braille met Barbier in 1821 in Paris, and developed his system soon after that, using only six dots per character. He died in 1853, a year before France adopted braille as the official communication system for blind people.

"The cheapest braille displays that cost some £900 tend to be about 12 cells in length, which means 12 characters," Dave Williams, a blind assistive technology trainer, consultant, and braille enthusiast told Ars UK. "So it's a bit like looking at one of those old Nokia phones, or using a calculator from the '80s.

"Obviously, it wouldn't make sense to have a 15-inch braille display, because your fingers can only touch a very small part of it at any one time anyway. But 12 cells is still not enough, and you have to keep pressing the button to read the next bit."

The reason why the existing braille displays and readers cost so much is the underlying technology they’re based on. Most of the devices on the market use ceramic piezoelectric bimorphs, which raise a braille dot connected to them when excited by an electrical control signal.

This means that for each dot in the reader—and there are normally six or eight dots per character—you need a separate bimorph to control it. The cost of materials and overall complexity of the design means that prices have remained quite high, even though most other consumer electronics have got much cheaper over time.

Holding back the tide

Although the problem of an affordable braille reader is quite obvious, there's no solution readily available on the market. Currently there are at least three different projects that we know of that are working to develop a multi-line refreshable braille screen to the readers.

Braille fact #2 The first ten letters in braille double as numbers from one to zero and use only four upper dots. The next ten letters are represented by the same dots with addition of the lower left one. For the next ten, the lower right dot is added instead. The letter "W" doesn't fully adhere to this logic, because it was rarely used in the French language at the time Braille developed his system. In what's called "Contracted braille," certain letters can double as full words.

One of those that appear to be the closest to the goal is Bristol Braille Technology, a non-profit organisation that's working on a multi-line braille e-book reader called Canute. Using off-the-shelf motors and plastic gears, the company plans to keep the price of Canute at £440, which is comparable to an iPad or entry-level laptop.

"King Canute tried to hold back the tide; the tide in this case being the decline in braille usage," said Ed Rogers, Bristol Braille founder, explaining the origins of the name. "It’s a quixotic statement of intent."

Under the hood, Canute is run by a Raspberry Pi computer that controls the motors. The open source firmware is programmed in C, while everything that has to do with the user interface is done in Python.

"We're using a very mechanical technology," Rogers said. "Rather than addressing individual pins, we address a whole column. We only have to have one motor for every line of pins."

Currently Rogers and his team are working on the seventh prototype of the Canute, which will be 1.5 inches thick and weigh about 2kg. The previous version, Mark VI, is a wooden box about 4 inches thick that weighs a few kilos. Despite the bulkiness, it earned positive feedback from members of the blind community who tested it.

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

Andrii Degeler

"We tested the Mark VI with 100 people, it went to 20 homes," Rogers said. "We loaded it up with books, and people really liked it. The feedback was to make it faster and smaller, which we've done [in the Mark VII]."

Rogers emphasised that the company has no intention of competing with the piezoelectric braille displays, or at least not yet. In the Canute, lines are refreshed one at a time, with a speed of about 0.3 seconds per line, which is fine for reading but isn't anywhere near the instantaneous refresh that the traditional technology can offer. It also won't be as silent, but "it's not going to be upsettingly noisy," said Rogers.

Braille fact #3 In order to "write" in braille, you'd need a special printer ("embosser"), which costs about £1,500, or a "Perkins Brailler." The latter is effectively a typewriter with six keys that correspond to six dots in the braille code. Using it isn't unlike playing piano, because all keys needed for each character have to be pressed simultaneously. A used typewriter of this kind can be bought off eBay for about £200.

Braille fact #4 Although most of the braille characters can be represented by six dots, many refreshable displays have eight dots per cell. Additional dots are used for showing some accented letters, things like bold or underline, as well as to represent the movement of a cursor.

"We're not making a braille display, it's an e-book reader," he concluded. "We want to get to the market before the end of the year."

An animator by education, Rogers has long since stopped working on anything other than the Canute. He founded Bristol Braille Technologies in 2012 and has managed to attract £120,000 in grants for the development of the Canute.

"We're always running on fumes," he said, explaining why he initially went for the social benefit model. "We're trying to make the device so cheap that it's just easier for us to get grant money. Engineers either volunteer their labour or work for very low rates. They appreciate that we're not doing it for a personal gain."

When the Canute reaches the market, Rogers plans to be selling "thousands of them."

"We can't just be relying on grants, we'll be self sustaining," he said. "But all the surplus we gain will be re-invested in the technology."

Wax and bubbles

Slowly grinding your way onto the market might be a viable strategy, given that plenty of other projects have been put on hold or abandoned altogether because of lack of funding.

"There are always quite a few companies trying to do the same thing, there've always been," Rogers said. "They do tend to fall by the wayside."

One of the most prominent examples is Anagraphs, a project by Pera Technology that raised £1.2 million from the European Union. The idea was to create a braille e-book reader using paraffin waxes that would expand in the right places when exposed to high temperature.

Unfortunately, the funding ran out in 2014, so Pera Technology, a definitely-for-profit product development contractor, put the project on hold.

Listing image by Andrii Degeler