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Sometimes brilliant ideas come out of the simplest situations.
A college student’s “light bulb” moment in the shower led to an innovation that would empower the blind.
Janna Aika Deja, a graduating multimedia arts student at De La Salle College of St. Benilde (CSB), designed and produced a Braille-embossed silicone case for Android tablets, one of the projects exhibited at the recent two-day DLSU Innovation and Technology Fair that also featured seminars and lectures.
The team of the De La Salle University (DLSU) Innovation and Technology Office led by lawyer Christopher Cruz, with the office of research and innovation, spent months gathering 55 new science and technology projects of students, faculty and staff from all De La Salle schools for the exhibit, now on its second year.
“As I was taking a shower, shampoo got into my eyes. It hurt so bad I couldn’t open them,” Deja said.
Groping her way out of the bathroom, an idea for a thesis was born: How could the blind use today’s technology? How could they use tablets?
She started researching and found that, while there were tablet applications (apps) for the visually impaired, using the gadgets themselves was a struggle.
The visually impaired had to make several frustrating attempts before they could manage to tap the right icon for an app.
Deja resolved to do something. “I wanted them to enjoy today’s technology as much as people with sight, so I tried to come up with a hardware technology that would allow just that.”
Deja had letters and numbers in Braille embossed on the right side and bottom of a tab’s silicone frame, corresponding to the rows and columns of the apps on the interface. Columns used letters while rows were tagged in numbers.