paige: low-cost multiline braille display
2019 – Ongoing
Braille is literacy - and the Paige team is dedicated to achieving affordable access to braille worldwide.
motivation and stakeholders behind the project
Over 43 million people are blind and the productivity loss from visual impairment is over 300 billion pounds a year. Braille enables people to develop literacy and access education and employment. People access digital braille using displays which are prohibitively expensive and limited to a single line of text. Indeed, an RNIB study has found that 84% of braille users in the UK do not own a display and that 51% cite high price as the reason not to purchase. As displays are limited to a single line of braille, they remove the context and layout needed for STEM, music, tables, and graphs.
The opportunity was identified during a field visit by inaglobe to the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust Africa mission in Kenya, along with several members and stakeholders of the community.
innovation cycle
The project was adopted into the Biomedical Engineering Department of Imperial College in 2019, and a team of students has nurtured it ever since. The team is building Paige: The world’s first low-cost, multiline braille display. The display can be used wirelessly alongside any device using the web app for reading, writing, graphing, and audio navigation. The price of existing displays increases with the number of braille characters. By reducing the number of parts the design drastically reduces the cost per character. The team tested the prototype at a school for the visually impaired and received compelling feedback from accessibility specialists.
To write multiline braille people currently emboss paper using braillers. Perkins has sold 395,000 worldwide, demonstrating the need for multiline braille. The Kilimanjaro Blind Trust has purchased 950 braillers to support students across Africa. Paige has partnered with the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust Africa and intends to partner with similar organisations in Europe and North America to facilitate fast access to a large pool of users.
contact the paige team
target Location
worldwide
the inaglobers: greg, nina, carolina, sergio & visva
The team is composed of 5 students from Imperial College London (Greg, Nina, Carolina, Sergio and Visva), who work in close collaboration with the braille community. They receive social entrepreneurship support from Unlimited and inaglobe, and are supported by a design for manufacture and IP firm.