Living life as visually impaired people in Thailand is not well and convenient like in developed countries where the facilities for people with disability are available and accessible. One of the most important is education where learning materials and books are still shortage. Nowadays, the main education center for Thai visually impaired people is the library of Thailand Association of Blind which now having only a thousand of Braille books. It’s incomparable to the normal people and this creates the limitation on self-learning and development to live their life equally.

Imagine how life of these visually impaired people will be changed if they have opportunity to read the braille map, learn geometry, study chemistry while can touch atoms, learn music notes and much more.

Samsung, the Chemistry professor from Thammasat University and Thailand Association of the Blind are collaborating to research, develop and have come up with innovative solution called “Touchable Ink” by adding embossing powder to the laser printing ink through chemical process. The users just simply replace the Touchable Ink cartridge to the current one, change the selected document to braille font type, print out and heat it with normal household heating devices like microwave or hair dryer. This special link will dilate and give an embossed effect, just like it’s printed out from the braille embosser and allow the blind people to be able to read by their fingers. We are now at the beginning of the journey, working hard is still in progress but we never stop and aim to complete it to give the life opportunity to all blind people.

This is the beginning of the journey to create real and meaningful social impact in order to change lives of more than 285 visually impaired people around the world to be able to live life equally like ordinary people with the ability to read by themselves. This can be happened thanks to the affordable printer equipped by Touchable Ink. With this ability, we do believe that it will increase endless opportunity for them to learn the world and empower them to create the world on their own with their imagination.

With our aim to create the sustainable change for visually impaired people to unlock their barrier and free their visualization to be able to read and learn the world by themselves.

Samsung, as the leading company in Consumer Electronics & Innovation in the world, what we always do is to make things that can change the better living for people in the society under our belief “Accelerating Discoveries and Possibilities”.

Nowadays, many different kinds of technology have been innovated to help blind people to visualize the world, from mobile app, virtual pencil, watch to glasses. However, these technologies have limitation to provide simple requirement they truly want – to be able to read by themselves with their fingers. Only basic device that allow them to do is the ‘braille embosser’ and print on special paper to produce Braille text based document but it’s very expensive and limited to access. Therefore, is there any possibility to commoditize the braille embosser so the blind people can simply afford and access to?