While most people rely on visuals to understand complex topics, the 285 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide are left out. Tactile books are scarce, expensive, and impractical. Audio descriptions fail to describe complex information.

There is a digital divide which is growing and excluding visually impaired people from content, products, and services. Existing accessibility technology require long transition periods and are simply not scalable and adaptable for majority of businesses.

Dot Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display for the visually impaired. It can display any visual content from any source because the innovative Dot Image Processing technology uses Al to analyze and understand visual input and present it most accurately on Dot Pad’s tactile display of 2,400 dots.

After inventing the most efficient actuator cell in 2014, Dot Inc. set out to digitalize text-to-Braille communication with Dot Watch and Dot Mini. The next natural step was to make graphics accessible. First launched as a tactile display in public kiosks in 2020, the portable version of Dot Pad was launched in 2022.

While conventional tactile devices use piezoelectricity to power their actuators, Dot Pad uniquely relies on electromagnetism, which reduces size, weight, power consumption and price by more than ten times.

Thanks to a partnership with Apple, Dot Pad integrates seamlessly with iOS and iPadOS, thereby giving users access to the 2.2 million apps on the App Store, out of the box. Dot Pad reduces dependence on tactile books and audio description for graphical content which sighted people are used to freely enjoying.

By partnering with organizations for education, entertainment, marketing, healthcare, and governance for distribution, Dot Inc. is making Dot Pad affordable to individuals while helping businesses reach a previously overlooked target group. Dot Inc. is partnering with tech companies to create a unified tactile graphic file format and a dedicated open database of tactile graphics.

Dot Pad is disruptive, because it’s not only a breakthrough in accessibility tech for people in need, but also a completely new medium for content producers.

It’s innovative in both hard- and software, with the patented Dot actuator and the smart Dot Image Processor. And because Dot is sharing their technology, other manufacturers don’t have to start from scratch.

Most importantly, Dot Pad has a profound positive impact on millions of lives. The ability to access visual content is key to education, employment, and participation in society. Dot Pad gives them that access.

Dot Pad has earned huge interest from the media as well as public and private institutions worldwide, with millions in dollars in orders. The Dot Pad technology is even being shared with competitors to give visually impaired people all around the world access to tactile graphics. Dot Pad technology is permanently installed in public kiosks in South Korea.

The Dot Pad was awarded at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2023 for Best Product Innovation and was recognized as the Best World Changing Idea in Asia by Fast Company. Dot Pad has disrupted the field of accessibility technology with tactile graphics. To create further software and hardware support for tactile graphics, Dot Inc. is in touch with major players including Apple, Google, and Microsoft to create a unified tactile graphic file format and a dedicated open database of tactile graphics. Dot Inc. is partnering with institutions like UCLA, Carnegie Mellon University, McGill University, Columbia University, American Publishing House for Blind, Andrea Bocelli Foundation, Humanware, KOICA, and more.

There are 285 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide who are excluded from a whole world of content. They have had to rely on expensive tactile books which just can’t keep up with the dynamic nature of content in today’s world. Audio descriptions aren’t enough to explain complex topics.

Conventional tactile devices use piezoelectricity to power their actuators, making them bulky and expensive. Further, translation of visual content into tactile one is complex. Conventional vectorization or edge detection algorithms aren’t capable of producing tactile graphics that are suitable for blind users. It requires intelligence to understand what’s in an image and decide what’s important to the audience.