Converting Text Into 3D Printable Braille

Dax Amburgy; John K. Estell

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Conference: 2024 ASEE North Central Section Conference
Location: Kalamazoo, Michigan
Publication Date: March 22, 2024
Start Date: March 22, 2024
End Date: March 23, 2024
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Page Count: 11
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--45601
Permanent URL: https://sftp.asee.org/45601
Download Count: 22

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Paper Authors

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Dax Amburgy Ohio Northern University College of Engineering

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I am a Junior Computer Science major with a concentration in Cybersecurity.

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John K. Estell Ohio Northern University orcid.org/0000-0001-6419-6821

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An active member of ASEE for over 30 years, Dr. John K. Estell was elected in 2016 as a Fellow of ASEE in recognition of the breadth, richness, and quality of his contributions to the betterment of engineering education. Estell currently serves as chair of ASEE's IT Committee; he previously served on the ASEE Board of Directors as the Vice President of Professional Interest Councils and as the Chair of Professional Interest Council III. He has held multiple ASEE leadership positions within the First-Year Programs (FPD) and Computers in Education (CoED) divisions, and with the Ad Hoc Committee on Interdivisional Cooperation, Interdivisional Town Hall Planning Committee, ASEE Active, and the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Estell has received multiple ASEE Annual Conference Best Paper awards from the Computers in Education, First-Year Programs, and Design in Engineering Education Divisions. He has also been recognized by ASEE as the recipient of the 2005 Merl K. Miller Award and by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) with the 2018 ASEE Best Card Award. Estell received the First-Year Programs Division’s Distinguished Service Award in 2019 and the 2022 Computers in Education Division Service Award.

Estell currently serves as an ABET Commissioner and as a subcommittee chair on ABET’s Accreditation Council Training Committee. He was previously a Member-At-Large on the Computing Accreditation Commission Executive Committee and a Program Evaluator for both computer engineering and computer science. Estell is well-known for his significant contributions on streamlining student outcomes assessment processes and has been an invited presenter at the ABET Symposium on multiple occasions. He was named an ABET Fellow in 2021. Estell is also a founding member and current Vice President of The Pledge of the Computing Professional, an organization dedicated to the promotion of ethics in the computing professions.

Estell is Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Ohio Northern University, where he currently teaches first-year programming and user interface design courses, and serves on the college’s Capstone Design Committee. Much of his research involves design education pedagogy, including formative assessment of client-student interactions, modeling sources of engineering design constraints, and applying the entrepreneurial mindset to first-year programming projects through student engagement in educational software development. Estell earned his BS in Computer Science and Engineering degree from The University of Toledo and both his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Abstract

Braille is a system of raised dots arranged in a 3-dot high by 2-dot wide grid that provides a tactile approach for a visually impaired person ability to read. Many buildings, including the engineering building at , provide accessibility accommodations by including Braille on all room signs; unfortunately, because of the need for external vendors to perform Braille renderings and the corresponding costs involved, many institutions provide no more than the bare minimum of just rendering the room number in Braille. However, as a room’s occupants and/or purpose can change, having a way to provide all visually displayed information in Braille using an economical and convenient manner would provide greater benefits. This undergraduate research project involves developing a methodology of rendering text into a 3D printable Braille file. This process involves first entering the text that the user would like to translate. This text is then converted into its Braille translation. From there, it is converted into an image. This is necessary for the 3D printing process. The current methodology for converting the 2D image into a 3D object is using an art technique known as a lithophane. This is a thin, translucent material that when light is shined behind it, the thicker sections show the image that is engraved in the material. In 3D printing, the thicker sections would receive more material, and therefore creating the dot matrix of each Braille character. The current time to print is approximately 30 minutes to 1 hour. To provide greater accommodations, magnets will be installed on the back of these signs to allow for transportability of the Braille plaques. This would allow professors to place temporary nameplates for classrooms, curators to announce art project names in the art building, and for dining services to label various dish names at the dining hall.

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Amburgy, D., & Estell, J. K. (2024, March), Converting Text Into 3D Printable Braille Paper presented at 2024 ASEE North Central Section Conference, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 10.18260/1-2--45601