I’m building Tactis, a low-cost, refreshable braille interface designed to make digital information accessible without the $2k–$5k price barrier of existing displays.
Problem:
Braille displays are expensive, fragile, and limited in capability.
Screen readers alone don’t work for literacy, math, or structured technical content.
Most visually impaired users are forced into audio-only workflows.
What this is:
A compact refreshable braille surface for reading and input.
Integrated voice → text and text → voice for hybrid interaction.
Designed from the ground up for affordability, repairability, and scale.
Hardware-first approach, not a tablet accessory or locked ecosystem.
What’s different:
Focus on cost reduction at the actuator/mechanism level.
Modular design so the same platform can support education, navigation, and productivity use cases.
Built with the assumption that braille literacy still matters.
Status:
Early prototype stage.
Validated problem through user interviews and assistive-tech orgs.
Currently refining the braille actuation mechanism and system architecture.
I’m sharing this to get:
Technical feedback on low-cost refreshable braille mechanisms.
Input from anyone who has built hardware for accessibility.
Reality checks from visually impaired users or educators.
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 I have seen so many great Braille devices let down by poor, slow, out-of-date software, especially since they started using Android.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for note taking etc is great though, but a bloated OS like Android or Windows just gets in the way and is quickly outdated.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."
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.
Aha! You might be just the person to ask about something that's I've always been curious about - are there any other types of Braille mechanisms other than the "pin on a lever arm" concept? They seem so fragile and clunky, and I'm surprised there hasn't been anything revolutionary that's sprung out of the miniaturization over the past 3 decades or so.
I agree with Rob here,
Piezoelectric displays are expensive to build, need quiet a bit of tuning and are almost always non-repairable.
When I was working on the Tactis and researching about all the mechanism' that exists, I came across Electromegnitism based mechanisms' very rarely, It is an underexplored way of building braille displays, mainly because of the actuation problem when being pressed against, we are trying to come up with a solution in our V2. Hopefully we get there.
There are some, in particular the orbit reader[0] is much cheaper than a piezoelectric display. The trade off is that is is relatively slow to refresh and quite noisy.
There is also the dot pad[1] which is much more like a screen with a rectangle of cells that can show Braille and graphics! It is a different technology using electromagnetic actuators with latching. It can only refresh when not being touched. It's also out of the price range of most consumers, but apparently the technology scales very well so they expect the price to fall. It is also modular so users can easily replace broken cells.
The Monarch[2] is based on Dot Pad technology and also runs Android and Humanware's Keysoft software like the BrailleNotes.
Hi HN,
I’m building Tactis, a low-cost, refreshable braille interface designed to make digital information accessible without the $2k–$5k price barrier of existing displays.
Problem:
Braille displays are expensive, fragile, and limited in capability.
Screen readers alone don’t work for literacy, math, or structured technical content.
Most visually impaired users are forced into audio-only workflows.
What this is:
A compact refreshable braille surface for reading and input.
Integrated voice → text and text → voice for hybrid interaction.
Designed from the ground up for affordability, repairability, and scale.
Hardware-first approach, not a tablet accessory or locked ecosystem.
What’s different:
Focus on cost reduction at the actuator/mechanism level.
Modular design so the same platform can support education, navigation, and productivity use cases.
Built with the assumption that braille literacy still matters.
Status:
Early prototype stage.
Validated problem through user interviews and assistive-tech orgs.
Currently refining the braille actuation mechanism and system architecture.
I’m sharing this to get:
Technical feedback on low-cost refreshable braille mechanisms.
Input from anyone who has built hardware for accessibility.
Reality checks from visually impaired users or educators.
Site: https://braillepadpro.web.app/
This is not polished, not finished, and not a pitch deck. It’s a real problem that needs better engineering.
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."
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.
Aha! You might be just the person to ask about something that's I've always been curious about - are there any other types of Braille mechanisms other than the "pin on a lever arm" concept? They seem so fragile and clunky, and I'm surprised there hasn't been anything revolutionary that's sprung out of the miniaturization over the past 3 decades or so.
I agree with Rob here, Piezoelectric displays are expensive to build, need quiet a bit of tuning and are almost always non-repairable.
When I was working on the Tactis and researching about all the mechanism' that exists, I came across Electromegnitism based mechanisms' very rarely, It is an underexplored way of building braille displays, mainly because of the actuation problem when being pressed against, we are trying to come up with a solution in our V2. Hopefully we get there.
There are some, in particular the orbit reader[0] is much cheaper than a piezoelectric display. The trade off is that is is relatively slow to refresh and quite noisy.
There is also the dot pad[1] which is much more like a screen with a rectangle of cells that can show Braille and graphics! It is a different technology using electromagnetic actuators with latching. It can only refresh when not being touched. It's also out of the price range of most consumers, but apparently the technology scales very well so they expect the price to fall. It is also modular so users can easily replace broken cells.
The Monarch[2] is based on Dot Pad technology and also runs Android and Humanware's Keysoft software like the BrailleNotes.
[0] https://www.dotincorp.com/en/product/dotpadx
[1] https://www.dotincorp.com/en/product/dotpadx
[2] https://www.aph.org/product/monarch/