Embossed Braille with 3D Printing: Affordable, Accessible, and Open-Source

Embossed Braille with 3D Printing: Affordable, Accessible, and Open-Source(braillest.com)

3 points by ramity 1 year ago | 2 comments

jareds 1 year ago |

As someone who is blind I don't understand the target market for this? You can get a basic Braille embosser for $1500. Assuming your using braille paper for both ways of producing braille the embosser will break even after 1000 pages. When I was in school the school district had a basic embosser that was used to print out worksheets and reading material that was not textbooks. I'd routinely go through over 20 pages a day some days, this system can only print out four unique pages a day with a single 3d printer. I could see this being useful for incredibly niche runs of text, for example someone who already has a 3d printer being able to create a braille birthday card for a blind friend or family member. I'd like to see the ability to pay for pre-assembled versions of https://github.com/braillerap/BrailleRap

ramity 1 year ago | |

Thanks for your reply. The target market is anyone who has interest, as I've open sourced the tooling I used for translating text to braille and generating the geometry of the molds. I'm hoping to create a follow up post announcing a web ui that will make the functionality more accessible to a broader audience.

It's sad to hear the poor performance of embossers. In terms of lifetime, I only have about 150 or so pages created with my prototype molds, but I haven't been able to detect a degradation in the embossing quality. I think at that number of copies created and a set of molds only costing $1.50, it makes me feel it's gotten some value out of it. I think someone can buy the equipment I'm using for around $800 in total. Obviously there's a bit of a tradeoff and at some point the number of molds would exceed the cost of an embosser, but I argue this approach is pretty quick for a manual one (for now).

The pain of the approach is the printing times for sure. One bit of confusion I can clear up is that, while yes, the single 3D printer I use can only print 4 unique sets of page molds a day, using the molds is fast! My time to beat is 15 seconds to manually position a sheet of paper between the mold bodies and roll it though a cheap roller press. 4 pages a minute is pretty quick for an embosser, but this is still just manual. Now imagine it automated :) Expecting a human to do 15 seconds/press for a full work day makes me sad, but that'd be a lot of birthday cards.

I really appreciate the link to the BrailleRap project. It's cool to see innovation in the space, and I subscribe to the RepRap philosophy. I'm currently prototyping designs to automate the pressing process, but until that component is automated, this approach lies somewhere between manual and automated embossing in terms of utility. That being said, still much more accessible and cost-effective.