Drishti was the project that me and my friends, Dheeraj S. Nair, Pranoy Prasannan and Sreekant Somashekharan did as a part of our Bachelor of Technology programme.Drishti is a gesture based electronic text to braille converter. The device which can convert digital texts in pdf of doc format into braille, so that visually challenged people can access digital texts.

Braille displays are used despite of the availability of many text to speech
synthesizers due to the fact that speech synthesizers do not provide the
flexibility in reading that braille displays provide. Speech synthesizers
need the full attention of the user, it cannot be used in noisy environments.
Braille displays are used in situations like the office where the
user has to attend phone calls while reading a text or has to respond to
audio signals while working on documents. Use of text to speech synthesizers
reduce the braille literacy level,
The major objectives of this project are:

1. To enable the deaf-blinded people to access digital texts.
2. To create a low cost reading device for the sightless.
3. To increase the profficiency of blind in using computers.
4. It can be used in places where alot of noise is present.
5. It can be used for Jobs where the users attention has to be given to phone calls or other audio messages.
6. To enable the blind to perform well with computers in offices.
7. As an alternative to text-speech synthesizers.
8. To enable the spreading of computer literacy among the blind population.
9. We use a single braille cell and a motion sensor so that the user can go through the text at his/her own pace.
10. An Open Source project built with open source tools.

The device drishti can be used by anyone who knows to read braille. It works on linux and windows platform. In windows presently it detects only pdf and txt files whereas in linux it can detect pdf, doc,odt and txt. Drishti can also read txt files that are stored in micro sd cards. All files to be read are to be stored in a folder drishti within the Documents folder of the user. On running the program all files of formats mentioned above will be converted to txt format and it is these txt files that Drishti reads. The user just has to scroll using the touchpad and feel the braille cell.If the user decides to read from the memory card just insert it in the slot and push the reset button. a green led is provided on top to check if the micro sd card has been detected.

Paper in IEEEXplore