Based on empathy, sharing and understanding the difficulties and inconveniences that visually impaired people face every day, especially in moving to specialized printing facilities to access learning materials, a group of students from the Faculty of Physics, the University of Education, a member of the University of Da Nang - UD has successfully created a Braille printer.

A group of students make a presentation about their research on Braille printers.

After a long time of researching, a group of five students: Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang, Le Dang Hoang Thu, Ngo Thanh Truc, Le Viet Thien Loc and Dinh Thi Mai Chi shared their ideas and passion with their lecturer Dr. Le Thanh Huy. With the lecturer's encouragement and guidance, these talented students were successful in designing and manufacturing a Braille printer with a low cost but with many conveniences compared to those on the market to serve the visually impaired.

In August 2023, the project was officially launched. After analyzing the theory and practice, the group built a schematic diagram of the operating principle, design requirements to proceed with manufacturing and testing the product.

However, from the idea to the drawing, then from the drawing to the reality of having a printer is not easy for students majoring in pedagogy. Many times, they wanted to give up because many details were too difficult, there were absolutely no documents or models to learn and research, but thinking about the difficulties and inconveniences that caused many obstacles for visually impaired students, the whole group encourage each other to overcome these obstacles.

Sharing about the idea of making a Braille printer, Ngo Thanh Truc excitedly recalled that in reality, many visually impaired people when wanting to print a document or a book had to go to printing facilities with specialized printers, which was quite inconvenient and time-consuming. Meanwhile, most of the Vietnamese Braille printers are currently imported, with very high prices, ranging from VND 40 million to more than VND 100 million per machine and even higher.

“Therefore, manufacturing a small-scale, low-cost automatic Braille printer is very necessary to improve the current situation, especially for schools for the disabled. That is the reason why our group started researching and manufacturing this special printer,” Thanh Truc added.

After a long time of focused research, with the encouragement and enthusiastic guidance of Dr. Le Thanh Huy, in May 2024, the group successfully designed and manufactured a Braille printer for the visually impaired, successfully building a programming language to convert regular characters to Vietnamese Braille characters.

Dr. Le Thanh Huy, lecturer, shared: “Currently, all types of Braille printers in use are imported from abroad, so the ability to produce and popularize Braille printers domestically will be a new turning point marking the development of technology in our country. The printer researched and manufactured by students of the University of Education can be used with simple operations, converting directly from electronic text to Braille symbols and printing without the need for other supporting software”.

Accordingly, the printer is designed with 3 main parts Braille character conversion software on the computer; control system and actuator.

The operating principle of the machine is that text in normal form is entered or typed directly on the conversion software. Normal text characters are converted by the software to the corresponding Braille characters but in 0.1 encoding form. The text after encoding will be loaded into the memory of the control system. The control system uses encoded text information to control the actuator to print Braille text.

“When starting the project, the group requested to minimize operations, to best serve the visually impaired. To connect to the printer, users can use a computer with Arduino IDE software via a USB interface, from there press print directly to produce complete Braille text", student Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang said.

At the same time, the research team applied 3D printing technology in the product manufacturing process. The printer is designed to be minimalist, convenient for cleaning, easy to repair, compact in size, easy to transport, allowing users to flexibly use it in many different locations, in the classroom as well as at home. Schools and parents can easily print learning materials for visually impaired students. Another advantage is that this printer makes very little noise when operating compared to other Braille printers.

The most surprising thing is that in addition to the convenience and compactness of the printer, the price of this product is very suitable for the visually impaired. The total cost to create this product is about VND 2 million to VND 5 million /machine.

To optimize efficiency, the product is currently being further researched to improve some features such as: speed, printing efficiency, document diversity, integrating voice conversion technology to print into Braille to make it complete and convenient so that it can be popularised and widely applied to serve life.

The group of students has brought their research topics to many scientific research conferences and achieved high results such as  the first prize at the faculty-level Scientific Research Conference for the 2023 - 2024 academic year; a third prize at the school-level Scientific Research Conference for the 2023 - 2024 academic year, a third prize in the fields of science and technology, medical science of the Da Nang University-level Student Scientific Research Award for the 2023-2024 academic year.

Reporting by NHU HOA - Translating by A.THU