Funded in 2024 – This project by Bristol Braille Technology CIC intends to better open up publicly accessible APIs to blind developers and academics by creating a universal language of spacial, tactile interfaces that run on novel electromechanical displays as well as being embossed to paper.

Just as common land that is only reached by jumping a stile is inaccessible by wheelchair, so sighted assumptions in public APIs makes much of the Internet commons inaccessible for blind developers and academics. This project will use a grid of electromechanical cells to present multidimensional data — tabular, vectors, graphs — as refreshing patterns of physical dot. Bristol Braille Technology and their partners in the Bristol University Computer Science Department will develop abstractions for tactile imagery as a reusable library of functions.

The aim is to greatly increase the inclusion of blind developers and academics in the future of a commonly owned Internet by working with tabular and spacial data sets, representing that data in a way that makes sense in tactile form in the same way they they are expected to make sense in a visual way. The output will be available publicly for use on Bristol Braille Technology’s own Canute hardware, on future full page tactile displays, and in paper form via the thousands of existing Braille embossers.