IInclusive TipToi Pen

For my bachelor thesis at TU Dresden, I worked on how to allow people that are blind or have vision impairments to explore diagrams, like bar and pie charts. As the resolution of fingers is quite limited and Braille is sometimes not sufficient to describe large amount of data, other paths were explored.

The TipToi-Pen is a big pen that is targeted at children books. They can touch at an image in the book with the pen and the pen starts talking abouth the contents. This works by the pen scanning barely visible dot patterns that are printed over the book pages. A community reverse engineered the pen to provide a tool to build custom logic for dot patterns that can be generated and printed. The idea was to print the dot patterns on top of hapticly explorable diagrams, so that a user can explore the element with their hands and tap on it with the pen to gain additional information.

Code for the TipToi-Pen was written in YAML consisting of direct instructions of reading some audio or text file as well as of jump instructions to build small connections and tools.