Braille Kindle

If you love to read, you would have definitely heard of e-readers such as Kindle. The ease of a thousand books accompanying you on any holiday while just taking up a fraction of the space has been amazing. Not only are the ebooks cheaper in most cases than the paperback versions, you don’t need endless bookshelves in your home to house them. That same convenience is now being offered to visually impaired readers who prefer to get their stories in Braille.

Canute 360 is a Braille e-book reader from Bristol Braille Technology. It has been called the “Kindle for the Blind”. The world’s first multi line Braille e-reader displays nine lines of a text at a time. The prototype has been well received in the scientific community and mass production is likely to begin this year. The price for the Canute 360 is likely to be the same as a high end laptop.

The e-reader has been awarded a £5K runners up grant in the 2018 NESTA inventors prize, awarded in conjunction with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial strategy, for the best new product which uses technology to tackle a social issue. Considering the powerful impact it will have once it is available commercially on the ability of visually impaired readers to access texts, the award is well deserved for this science project.