Braille Buddy is designing computer-vision powered braille books to help low-vision individuals learn braille independently. Led by Shaahana Naufal, Julia Turner, Mathurah Ravigulan and Ayla Orucevic, the group of fourth-year systems design engineering students are hoping to address the declining literacy rate among American children who have visual impairments and living in low-income communities.
“We’ve completed our image classification model, where we essentially take an image of each page of our braille book that is being read and isolate each character into its own images,” explained Orucevic, a Faculty of Engineering student.
“Then we would feed those images into our machine learning model which converts them into English texts. We’re also building out the motion tracking feature, which would allow us to detect the coordinates of finger movement along with paper recognition.”
With the Social Impact Fund, Braille Buddy hopes to register their device with the Ontario Assistive Devices program and partner with various school boards and low-vision organizations that the team are already in contact with, to pilot their device in real classroom and make Braille Buddy a reality for many children.
Braille Buddy also received an Don Walker Prize from the Engineer of the Future Fund.
SYDE students Shaahana Naufal, Julia Turner, Mathurah Ravigulan and Ayla Orucevic receive $1,500 Social Impact Fund award.
Read the full list of Social Impact Fund winners.