Invented 200 years ago, braille resists AI

“This year, I’m starting Braille with a young person who wasn’t interested. Finally, she notices that it relieves her eyesight, it gives her another tool and that she succeeds.” Éric Obyn, professor of literary braille at the National Institute for Young Blind People in Paris (INJA), can tell some of the stories of skeptical students during the first lessons to whom the practice then revealed itself.

Although he reformed access to education and autonomy for all the visually impaired and blind, the universal writing system with six raised points which allows reading with the fingers is today little popular. Invented two hundred years ago by Louis Braille, a 15-year-old genius born in Coupvray (Seine-et-Marne), it is celebrated from November 13 to 15 during a conference of international scope in Paris. However, in France, it is only mastered by 15% of the two million visually impaired people.

“Braille is not yesterday’s tool”

This is due to the fact that fewer children are being born blind, due to advances in medicine. Furthermore, more people are losing their sight later in life due to degenerative diseases or old age and are not learning Braille, a long and demanding process. Teachers are missing. Not to mention the ease of access to the use of voice synthesis or connected and talking glasses, powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

However, the challenge is to convince the younger generations to master this writing, at the risk of being illiterate: “For children and their families, Braille often symbolizes disability,” explains Éric Obyn. The main difficulty is acceptance.”

“Showing that braille is not yesterday’s tool” is the challenge. From now on, the teacher integrates the smartphone, a revolutionary tool, into his teaching. Messages written in Braille are translated into “your own code”. The computer equipped with a Braille display replaced the Perkins machine and the books are accessible on the Internet and transcribed automatically. AI, for its part, is mainly used for describing images: “It will not replace braille, but it provides real help on a daily basis,” believes Éric Obyn.

Innovate to complement, not to replace

At the Louis Braille campus in Paris, an international innovation center, created a year ago by four leading associations, twenty start-ups are working on improving daily life and the visually impaired thanks to new technologies. This November 14, they present the progress of their projects, based on feedback from the main stakeholders. Although they provide answers to practical problems, they cannot claim to replace Braille.

Ezymob specializes in mobility. Its application, free for users – when local authorities equip themselves with a license – includes several features including Guide which transforms, thanks to an AI, what is scanned in front of you into auditory content on station platforms in order to find your door or your seat on a train. “We provide a concrete solution when Braille is not on car seats, for example,” analyzes Camille Maldjian, general director of the startup. People can thus move easily to places they are unfamiliar with.”

The Cherchons pour voir research laboratory, the Institute for Young Blind People of Toulouse, developed the Deri project, operated by the company Handipulse. This software describes images to users when they move their fingers through relief materials placed on an interactive tablet. Christophe Jouffrais, director of research at the CNRS and the laboratory, nevertheless insists: “We are not fighting against braille, we are freeing access to drawings and graphics.”

Same conviction of Thibaut de Martimprey, general director of the campus, for whom AI would help develop learning in poor countries: “We could imagine that tutorials and tools would be accessible everywhere in the world.” Before specifying: “But braille remains the only solution for access to writing and reading.”

Promising progress that does not hide the digital divide. Innovations are expensive: count between 4000 and 5000 euros for a Braille range of 40 characters. Éric Obyn noticed that some of his students “were forced to return to Perkins. Fortunately, INJA lends the equipment, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to afford it.” For the teacher, it will be necessary to reduce the cost of equipment in the years to come if we want to continue to transmit this bicentennial code.