The Hindu Business Line : Multilingual Braille reader launched

Talking to presspersons, Dr M. N. Cooper, Chief Technical Officer and Mr R. R. Joshi, Director, Automatic Control Equipments, said Braille Mitra, the Braille reader, uses a new technology which have the characters in a row of six dots made by plastic pins, raised selectively by electro mechanical means to make a line of Braille characters. “The feel of this line to the sightless person’s index fingers is exactly the same as the feeling of an embossed Braille line in a Braille book,” he noted.

The Braille line is driven by a micro-computer and has features which helps the reader to read the next line without a break, as the next line appears automatically at the same place.

The display has user-friendly navigation controls and can be independent of a personal computer. The display can accept a pen drive of one GB or two GB capacity. A one GB pen drive can hold about 1,000 English or multiple-language books.

Dr Cooper noted that the desired book can be loaded in the basic resident 2MB memory of Braille Mitra by a command.

When the reader wants to read another book, the required book can be loaded on to the resident memory.

The user can also read the Braille book loaded in the memory by means of user-friendly commands such as next line, previous line, next page, previous page, go to desired page number, set a book mark, etc.

He said Braille Mitra has two units, the 16-Braille character per line, which helps in reading complete words without any breaks; and the 32-Braille character per line, useful for faster reading of books.

On both the units, books in English and other Indian languages such as Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Kannada, Telegu, Malayalam, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya and Punjabi could be read.

The price for the 16-Braille character unit is Rs 60,000 and the 32-bits Rs 92,000.

More Stories on : New Products & Services | Linguistics | Maharashtra

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page