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.

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.

Dot Pad. The first smart tactile graphics display for healthcare. 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.

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 textbooks and audio description for graphical content which sighted people are used to freely enjoying.

After inventing and patenting 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. The innovative Dot Image Processor uses AI to accurately map tactile graphics. First launched as a tactile display in public kiosks in 2020, the portable version of Dot Pad was launched in 2022 through CSUN Assistive Tech Conference California, with coverage from Tech Crunch U.S. and Japan.

Thanks to a partnership with Apple, users can access all the existing apps in the App Store in a tactile way. Dot Inc. is now partnering with institutions and organizations, both big and small to make sure the device reaches everyone in need. The Dot Pad technology is even being shared with competitors to give visually impaired people all around the world access to tactile graphics.

There are 285 million blind and visually impaired people worldwide who are excluded from a whole world of content. 84% of communication is visual. 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.

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.