Braille in one minute
Braille is a reading system made of raised dots that people feel with their fingertips. Each letter sits in a small grid called a cell, with room for six dots numbered like this:
From space to time
A phone has one vibration motor, so it can't make six dots at once. Instead, HaptiBraille plays the six dots one after another, like a short drum rhythm. A raised dot becomes a tap. A flat dot becomes a silence. A soft tick at the start tells you a new letter has begun, so you always know where to start counting.
For the letter h, you feel: tick, then tap, tap, silence, silence, tap, silence. Beats 1, 2 and 5 were taps, so the dots are 1, 2, 5: that's h. With the standard settings this takes just under one second.
Tuned to each person's touch
If taps come too fast or the pauses are too short, the brain can't tell them apart. Three quick taps start to feel like one long buzz. We call this sensory blur, and it is the main thing that makes vibration reading hard.
So every timing in HaptiBraille can be changed: how long a tap lasts, how long a flat dot's silence lasts, and the pauses between dots, letters and words. There are three ready-made speeds, and the app warns you if a setting is likely to blur letters together.
| Speed | Tap | Flat dot | Between dots | Between letters | Between words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beginner | 50 ms | 80 ms | 150 ms | 500 ms | 1000 ms |
| Standard | 40 ms | 50 ms | 100 ms | 300 ms | 600 ms |
| Fast | 30 ms | 40 ms | 70 ms | 200 ms | 450 ms |
Learning is part of the product
Because so few people can read vibrations today, HaptiBraille includes a full training course. You start by feeling single dots, move on to letters, then to short words. You unlock each level by reaching 80% accuracy, and the letters you find hardest come up more often.
Talking, not just reading
Reading is only half of a conversation. In Talk to me, a hearing person speaks into the phone. HaptiBraille turns their words into text and plays them as Braille vibrations, so a deafblind person can understand someone who has never learned Braille or sign language.