BY CINDY GERLACH
PHOTOS PROVIDED BY CITY OF LAFAYETTE
Imagine a tablet computer that can display a map. Or play a video game. Or show a baseball game. Easy enough.
Now imagine a tablet computer that does those things, only in Braille.
This is the dream the team at Tactile Engineering is bringing to reality. The Cadence Tablet, a modular, hand-held device, will bring both static and dynamic content to life in Braille, in order to help the visually impaired experience all facets of life just as their sighted peers do.
The idea came to Wunji Lau, chief marketing officer, and Dave Schleppenbach, CEO, when they were students at Purdue University in the mid-1990s. Schleppenbach had some experience with Braille and was asked to help some visually impaired chemistry students with classes. He and Lau teamed up to assist them.
“We had these two students,” Lau recalls. “They were in pre-med and they were in trouble because chemistry, complex mathematics, any science class, requires a huge amount of graphics. So we were just printing graphics on paper, which was tedious and time-consuming. We thought it would be great if we could just do this electronically, just have the dots move up and down. How hard could that be?
“Well, 25 years later, it’s really hard.”
At the time, Lau and Schleppenbach had to rely on existing technology. Those older versions could only offer static content; plastic diagrams with metal plates were created to make large prints, which were expensive, and bulky — they are tactile, but not easily transportable. This, Lau says, was something they wanted to change; their goal was to create this same content electronically.
“All we want is to do this but in an electronic format,” he says. “Our technology does this, but it allows animation to be shown. Even something simple like just a moving ball. Once we realized we could do that, we have blind kids playing Pong. Furthermore, we have blind kids playing Pong with each other across the table or in separate rooms, on the internet. Internet gaming, internet interaction that blind people never had access to is now open.”
This is not necessarily new technology, Lau says. There are older versions of Braille tablets that offer this experience. But the old technology used a fragile kind of Braille cell that could only be arranged in a single line of Braille. In order to add another line, the machine just gets thicker and thicker.
“There have been plenty of other projects to make tactile Braille,” says Lau. “But the specific technology to do it affordably and mass produce it is something we have managed to do.”
The primary goal for the Cadence is education, Lau says. They wanted to open up options for courses — higher level science and mathematics — and make them more accessible.
“We always wanted to make it so that anyone who wanted to take a science class, who wanted to go to college, who wanted to find a career that they wanted to do would have that opportunity.”
Education was challenging, in part because of the difficulty in getting textbooks. They are not routinely translated into Braille, so they have to be special ordered. If students wanted to take any kind of science course, they would have to wait for a Braille textbook to be made; the class would start in January and the textbook might show up in April. And then when a student is done with the textbook, there is no resale market. The cost to convert a Braille textbook and have it printed is about $50,000.
The Cadence Tactile Graphics tablet is groundbreaking, too, because it’s modular. One unit is the size of an iPhone, but it’s possible to group four of them together to make a larger screen.
Using translation software, designed by the company, books can be uploaded to the Cadence, including pictures and diagrams — even moving picture. Users can annotate these files — and they can be shared.
“They can collaborate, they can discuss that with their teachers,” Lau says. “Teachers can make new content and distribute it around to all those who need it.
“And that’s really what we wanted to do. We wanted to build this community — a community that sighted people take for granted. This is something that is critical for school, for being able to work. This is what we wanted to do, to give that access.”
This display can cause rivers to highlight; chasing dots can show the flow of different bodies of water or weather patterns. Labels can pop up, in Braille, labels that can change dynamically. Users can zoom in. One of the first pieces of curriculum is an interactive periodic table. Having it all on the Cadence means students do not have to deal with a giant chart, nor do they need 118 individual flashcards.
It opens up, too, leisure activities that blind people have always been locked away from, says Lau. Video games, live sporting events, streaming content.
“This becomes a platform for media and communications and entertainment that has never existed before,” he says. “I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s a whole new method of communication.”
The tablet is manufactured locally, at Tactile Engineering’s factory on Duncan Road. The start-up company includes Lau and Schleppenbach, along with fellow Purdue grads Alex Moon and Tom Baker.
Also involved? Those two blind students who were tutored by Schleppenbach and Lau back in the ’90s.
“Really what drove this were a couple of students who went on to get Ph.D.s in chemistry, believe it or not, as blind students, and they still work with us to this day,” Schleppenbach says. “Kind of far out when you think about it.”
The start-up has support from the Purdue Foundry and other seed money from a group of investors. It also is working with Purdue Manufacturing Extension Partnership, helping it ramp up production from a start-up to a real company.
The factory is as automated as possible, Lau says. They have had help from other Indiana companies — it is a totally Hoosier product, he says. “A lot of the manufacturing techniques we use are things that people said could not be done. So we spent many years proving that wrong.”
There are 384 individual Braille dots in each tablet; each dot is powered to go up and down. Each one has to be carefully wound on a machine. After each coil is made, a set of robots puts them in individual modules; these modules can be replaced separately. Thus, if one part of the display breaks, only that part needs to be replaced; the other three still work.
The parts have to be extremely precise in size; any slight mistake turns into a huge error. Each unit has 64 tiny welds. Initially, all of that was done by hand, but now it’s automated. Everything is carefully tested; each dot is run 25,000 times, to make sure it’s functioning correctly. The displays are then assembled by hand.
The initial deployment centers around schools, starting in Indiana. By May, a dozen or so should be in use at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired; the goal is to have 150 to 200 in use by the end of the year. The company is moving slowly because, in addition to manufacturing, tech support needs to be in place. One advantage is that tech support can be done remotely; if a dot gets stuck, it can be pulsed back into alignment remotely.
Ultimately, Lau says they would like to have a Cadence for each student to use and to take home with them. Because continuity is important — they don’t want a break in the learning process.
“We’re trying to minimize the need to ever have to send it back to a repair person,” Lau says. The device can be repaired by any trained electrician.
There is no firm price yet, as the tablet is still in the initial piloting stage and not yet for sale. But Lau hopes to have it available for $3,000 to $4,000; they want it to be as affordable as possible.
Another advantage to their technology: they use a more common chip, hence no logistics issues.
“It is absolutely about trying to produce the best device that provides the most usefulness and that removes the most barriers between a person and the content they’re trying to get to. That’s really all we want to do,” Lau says.
Lau and Schleppenbach say they never imagined, when they reconnected around 2010, that this problem still existed — they assumed someone had already solved it. When they realized no one had, it became their goal to change the lives of people with visual impairments.
“We have three pillars: hardware, software and the social piece,” Lau says. “We want to make sure it’s getting to the people who need them.” There are thousands of children who are in schools elsewhere, and it has historically proven very difficult to get materials and aid to those children.
“Part of our task and part of advocacy is in finding ways to reach that hidden population of people who need this device,” Schleppenbach says. “The unfortunate reality is a lot of blind people who aren’t in an urban area or don’t have a large amount of resources available to them end up as partial shut-ins, or not getting adequate education, or end up shuffled off someplace where they don’t have a voice and they can’t get out. And we want to be able to change that.”
Schleppenbach says this concept, which is incredibly intricate and complex, has been one that is rewarding. It’s a project that has been 25 years in the making. But the process of changing people’s hearts and minds is not always quick and easy.
“The scale we work at is so small, so many moving parts, so many different areas of physics, chemistry and math that come together to make this work,” he says. “Yet despite all that, it’s not really about that tech, it’s about the impact on a person. And that’s something that’s hard to measure.”
The CDC estimates that 3 percent of children in grades K-12 are severely visually impaired, says Schleppenbach. These students can’t use a Chromebook to do their homework, they can’t see the blackboard, they may not even be able to find the restroom or might have trouble at recess.
“It’s a very different experience for those kids,” he says. “And nobody talks about it; they don’t have a voice. People don’t know because they don’t have an avenue to express that. So, they wait for people to come help them, and there’s no agency in that. We want them to have that agency given to them because they’ve got the technology to connect with people to be their own voice.”
The visually impaired can feel as if they are second-class citizens, Schleppenbach says. There are so many ways they can’t easily function, everything from taking exams to paying for items with cash to starting a washing machine. These things can all add up, and “it’s like a weight you carry,” he says. Yet there is a place for them in society; there are careers open to them and employers who would embrace them. This tablet can help with that.
“I feel that as a society it’s inherent in our culture, especially in America where we celebrate diversity, the great melting pot, we have an obligation to raise each other up,” he says.
“If we don’t pursue that to the best of our ability, not only is that wrong, but we’re missing so much. Do you really want to have 3% of your society not able to participate? They could be workers, they could be teachers, they could be the next genius. Who’s the next Stephen Hawking? Nowadays people are really sensitive to diversity and equity. Some issues of equity are not solvable with technology, but this one is.” ★
