[RobMurray]

My feeling is that focusing on the display hardware is the way to go. I have seen so many great Braille devices let down by poor, slow, out-of-date software, especially since they started using Android. The computing device part will always age worse than the display. It is just sad to see a $5800 Android tablet stuck on Android 8.1 and having worse speech responsiveness than devices from the 80s, and that is not an exaggeration.

We all have a supercomputer in our pockets that can quickly connect to a Braille display via Bluetooth.

Minimal software for note taking etc is great though, but a bloated OS like Android or Windows just gets in the way and is quickly outdated.

I'm curious why you think voice input is an important feature. Does that come from the needs of blind people you have spoken to? It seems like another thing to distract from producing an affordable Braille device.

I'm really not trying to be unduly critical, but this sentence stands out as utterly baffling: "Real-time voice-to-braille pipeline converts any digital text instantly."

[sujalbhakare]

I appreciate your response,

The main focus of Tactis is to provide affordable hardware that can bring features like on-the-go learning and navigation assistance to visually impaired people worldwide.

I agree with your statement where you critique the choice of words on voice-to-braille conversion. The intended use of it is to help users learn Braille.

With only 8-10% of people with partial to full visual impairment knowing braille, Tactis aims to educate the rest by giving them the feature to feel and understand how braille is represented as they speak. With this being one of the features, and understanding that the user should not need to maintain any external piece of smart hardware while using Tactis, we have built it in a way that the device does not rely on any type of Android software infrastructure; it is based on a custom-built Debian-based operating system that lets bring the best performance out of the minimal hardware we can ship to keep the price point low.

The whole mission is to bring the cost down, so the mechanism used to raise the dots is also not what the most expensive braille displays have. Although it is not new, we are using an electromagnetism-based mechanism + latching to overcome the production cost pain point.

All of this just to acknowledge that there aren't many people in the world that needs braille to understand the world better, but just don't have access to learn it. So we had to build stuff into Tactis that not only focuses on the Navigation and content consumption aspect of the device, but also the braille learning point of it.

I hope this helps.

[RobMurray]

Yes, that makes perfect sense. Apologies for the overly negative tone of my comment.

Do you have a description of the device with specs, or is it in earlier development than that?

Are you using the technology from DotPad, or do you have your own?

Does it have a Braille keyboard for input? I would consider that essential for education.

I fully agree that education is the most important thing. Without it Braille will die. In the UK blind schools are dying out, replaced by specialist teachers who visit mainstream schools. It's just not the same and children don't have much incentive to learn Braille.