New Delhi, Mar 2: Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi have made a laptop, which would unable visually-impaired people to use these systems for the first time in India. What set these laptops, or dotbooks as they have named it, apart is that they use the Braille format as an interface instead of visual ones. The laptop has been created by both researchers and alumnus of the engineering institute.
It has been reported that some of the students who developed the laptops, opted out of the placement process at the engineering college to work on the project. In fact, some of them had not taken jobs and worked on building the project for over five years. Two of those students are Pulkit Sapra and Suman Muralikrishnan. Both Sapra and Suman hail from Chennai and opted to do research for the project instead of taking up jobs. While Pulkit did his BTech in Mechanical engineering, Muralikrishnan has an MS degree. They have reportedly launched two different varieties of the laptop – one with a 40 cell version and the other with 20 version cell. The cells refer to the number of characters which have been placed along one line.
What are Dotbooks like?
Both the laptops operate on the Linux platform. While their internal storage capacity is 4GB, it can expanded to 64 GB. The 40 cell version uses a Qwerty keyboard and the 20 cell version uses Perkins keys.
The laptops can be operated through touchpads and their screens display text carved in Braille. Differently abled people can feel everything on a laptop by touching it. “The idea was conceived by some of our seniors about seven to eight years ago. When I joined the college we started working on it as a project but as it started developing, it made us all the more intrigued into it,” Pulkit said, adding, “We started interacting with people and started to work on an interface which can share maximum information and in a user-friendly way.”
Challenges galore and tests still on
According to the developers the biggest challenge in creating the laptops was to put all the information in one line. But that was not it. Other challenges in creating Dotbooks, include creating bold in Braille, marking emails as read or unread. The group plans to put the laptops through a lot of testing even after its launch. They expect to make it available in the market in the next couple of months. The cost of the 20 cell version is Rs. 40,000 and the 40 cell version is Rs. 60,000.