According to the World Health Organization, October 2018, approximately 1.3 billion people globally live with some form of vision impairment – of which 36 million are blind.

This impacts quality of life in more ways than we can imagine. Technologies for the blind have not been able to deliver the desired impact through the last five decades, irrespective of intent or effort. Through Touché, we aim to create an affordable technology with the objective of addressing the social issues they face. It's an innovation that harnesses a thoughtful idea, coupled with technology; a valuable digital-tactile bridge for the visually impaired.

The primary means of literacy for the blind is tactile literacy. Braille is the foremost tactile system of literacy thus far. The digital revolution created a gap between digital and tactile technologies, audio-focused technology being adapted for use by the visually impaired. The result: generations of visually impaired people who were 'Braille illiterate'. The consequences of this shortfall, for society as a whole, cannot be overstated.

About 50 years ago, the piezoelectric actuated Braille Display was developed and continues to remain popular to this day, and being upward of 1500 USD, makes it unaffordable for most.

With Touché, our objective has been to create an affordable Braille Display to put the digital revolution within easy reach of the blind population across the globe, of which 8.8 million are in India alone. We have leveraged open-source libraries and off-the-shelf hardware, enabling multi-lingual support using the globally accepted 8 dot Braille layout.

At every stage of the conceptualization, creative design and development, we have kept the user at the center of our thought-universe.

Touché is a portable Braille E-Reader – an elegant and easy-to-use device, able to convert any text document to Braille, in real time. It is easy to learn - school children and persons who were not exposed to this level of tech took less than thirty minutes to learn how to use it.

Touché has been designed with affordability and maintainability in mind, from the ground up. 89% of visually impaired people live in low and middle-income countries, which makes this a necessity.

The innovative use of low cost mass-produced miniature vibration motors, the kind found in mobile phones, coupled with a modular design, makes Touché easy to maintain and repair – enabling a visually impaired owner to perform cleaning and minor replacement repairs with minimal training.

April 2017: We begin a round of Beta testing of Touché at schools for the blind in Bangalore - JyothiSeva School for the Blind and the Deepa Academy and in Delhi - Institution For The Blind (Amar Colony). Testing involved about a dozen students from each institution.

Nov 2017: Touchétech Labs Private Limited wins a grant from the government of Karnataka under the ELEVATE 100 scheme.

Jan 2018: Work on redesigning the Touché device starts to develop an improved version, incorporating an input mechanism, which would make the device a full-blown braille enabled computer.

Feb 2018: The 8 dot braille cells using the previous design fuels progress in other low-cost Braille enabled technology.

Jul 2018 - Present: Prototyping and testing of newly designed components.

Braille Display technology has not changed significantly for over half a century. Existing technology is based on expensive piezo bimorph reeds - small metal cantilevers coated with piezoelectric material that bend when subjected to electric potential, which is used to lift small tactile pins.

The only way we could create an affordable solution was to do it differently!

We developed a method of using commonly available DC micro vibration motors to indicate digital logic - a 1 or a 0. The motor also serves to lift small tactile pins. Several of these motors are stacked in a particular arrangement and coupled to an arrangement of pins which forms Braille characters when properly actuated. In essence, the motors are not used as motors or vibrators, but as logic indicators and pin lifters.

We developed a modular design, which could be user assembled and self-serviceable. India, being home to the largest blind population in the world and considering the environmental factors, it was essential to design with reparability as a core tenant. Making the design easy to clean enables the user to maintain the device from dust, sweat, and grime, which would otherwise impair the operation of similar devices.

India has an estimated 56.5 million visually impaired people of which 8.8 million are blind – approximately a quarter of the world’s blind population. A first step in empowering this segment of society is to make them literate and provide them with a sound educational foundation.

Touché is that ‘empowering agent’ - an easy-to-use Braille display, to assist and encourage Braille literacy, and henceforth, empowering a person's direct access to digital content.

Touché has been successfully tested by over 350 users, including students in 3 schools. Leveraging opensource libraries, mass-produced components, and clever modular design, Touché is affordable (under 500 USD), maintainable and extensible in the long term.

Touché components are now powering innovation in other braille tools and technology. With government grants, we are extending the beta version with an input mechanism to transform Touché into a full-blown Braille enabled computer – a bridge between digital and tactile.