BLITAB is an Android tablet combining a smart Braille surface. It is also an affordable Braille device and could change the way visually impaired people use computing devices.
Braille devices for this market can cost up to $5,000 and tend to run outdated operating systems. BLITAB is only going to cost $500.
In addition to being a cheaper version of an existing product, it’s a much more useful device. At heart, it’s an Android tablet, so it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and can run Android apps. It also supports all the cool accessibility features in Android, such as TalkBack.
When you press the button on the side of the device the top half of the device turns into a Braille reader. You can load a document, a web page and then read the content using Braille.
Behind the scenes, the BLITAB tablet uses small bubbles to change the state of these bubbles in very little time. The company is thinking about more powerful features. For instance, you could think about drawing a Google Maps view on the top half of the device so that you can feel the map.
The BLITAB team started working on the tablet device in 2014 and plans to ship the tablet in six months with pre-orders starting this month.
