We present the second in the Building a Free Internet of the Future series, where we publish a monthly interview with NGI Zero (NGI0) grantees. With funding from the European Commission, NGI0 supports open source, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides both financial and practical support in a myriad of ways, including mentoring, testing, security tests, accessibility, dissemination and more.
This month, we have an interview with BrailleRAP, an open source printer that produces documents in Braille. In 2016 in France, the My Human Kit association organised a hackathon called Fabrikarium in collaboration with Airbus Industries. During the Fabrikarium, several projects modified 3D printers to emboss Braille onto 160g paper. One such project was BrailleRAP, an open source embosser that can output Braille text in dozens of languages and can emboss contours, including building plans, animal shapes and maps. They also provide an application to transcribe Braille.
In 2024, BrailleRAP received NGI0 Entrust funding. APC spoke to Stéphane Godin, creator of BrailleRAP. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
BrailleRAP has been around since 2016 and this year it received a grant from NGI0. What does this change for you?
The grant from the NGI0 Entrust programme of the NLnet Foundation will allow us to devote time to developing the software associated with the use of the Braille embosser. Like many open source projects, BrailleRAP started without funding. In these conditions, it is difficult to make the project known and to develop it in a coherent way to have a real impact in the field.
Embossing text with a printer is an important way of providing access to various communications such as cultural content, education, legislation, etc. Your project is under a free licence, which means it can be contributed to, reproduced, reused, modified and marketed. Who makes BrailleRAP?
Today BrailleRAPs are made by fab labs (fabrication laboratories) or universities, but also by individuals concerned by visual disability in their surroundings.
To date, I know of just over 30 BrailleRAP machines built around the world. On the other hand, some of them are built completely independently without me being informed, which is normal, as the licence allows it. So I discover new ones from time to time in a post on social media.
BrailleRAP is a project with reproductions and contributions in India since 2018 and in Cameroon since 2022. How did these international links happen?
Cameroon is a special case. It's linked to a meeting between My Human Kit, the Climate Change Lab and ANIAAC-Intégration et Accomodation des Personnes Aveugles au Cameroun (Integration and Accommodation of Blind People in Cameroon), an association of visually impaired people in Cameroon, at a forum organised by AIMF (L'Association Internationale des Maires Francophones/the International Association of French-Speaking Mayors). This meeting led to a three-week mission to Cameroon where we organised four assembly workshops in four different towns. Above all, BrailleRAP Cameroon provided an opportunity for day-to-day collaboration with an association of visually impaired people. This long-term collaboration had a major influence on the project's specifications.
For the other contributions, it was a matter of chance encounters at events or during internet searches. It's a chance meeting that brings together a need for Braille with the world of makers, fab labs and universities.
A “classic” Braille embossing machine costs EUR 4,000 to EUR 5,000. For BrailleRAP you estimate a working time of 16 to 22 hours and a material supply cost of EUR 100 to EUR 200, provided you have access to certain digitally controlled manufacturing machines (laser cutting and 3D printing equipment, in particular). It seems that BrailleRAP is not just about making things, it's also about access to resources and social links to get support. How is this materialising in the development of the BrailleRAP project?
This touches on our perception of the world in a consumer society. We tend to think that if the solution to a problem isn't offered by the market, or if that solution is too expensive, we don't have a solution. As if an abstract entity proposed and had always proposed all the solutions in the world. There is another way, not necessarily contradictory but complementary, which consists of bringing together resources and skills to propose solutions. In a way, fab labs have highlighted this phenomenon by encouraging the mixing of populations, and therefore of needs on the one hand and skills on the other. All in the midst of a set of tools that enable experimentation and prototyping.
This is the story of BrailleRAP, where a few people meet a visually impaired person and try to produce Braille. Other people took up this work and produced a prototype machine, the first BrailleRAP. BrailleRAP then crossed paths with Liblouis, a long-standing project in the free software world, which enables text to be translated into Braille in most of the world's languages. And then we begin to see a solution for producing Braille in a family, an association or a small school in a rural environment.
In the end, the common thread running through the BrailleRAP adventure is the documentation of the project and its distribution via the internet. It's really the wide dissemination under open licence that makes it possible to establish links between the various players. Players who will then have an impact locally through their day-to-day activities.
BrailleRAP also allows you to learn how to use the tactile writing that is Braille. Learning and sharing are important mechanisms in our social life. Is BrailleRAP working on the inclusion of individuals in these mechanisms?
Yes indeed, in a number of ways. Firstly, BrailleRAP is a digital machine, so it can be used to organise introductory workshops in which we'll be looking at digital manufacturing through laser cutting and 3D printing. A bit of mechanics, a bit of electronics and software to control it all. These workshops are interesting because, on the one hand, they demystify the complexity of these machines and of digital technology and, on the other hand, the social aspect of the project illustrates the use of digital technology from an angle that is not very often highlighted: inclusion. It helps to raise awareness or train people in digital technologies, while also making them aware of the fact that digital is a tool. And a tool does not define the meaning of its use, so we can make digital social, environmental, inclusive or just useful.
The second area is raising awareness of inclusion in our societies. BrailleRAP started out as a technical project, with the challenge of coming up with plans for a functional machine that would be easy to reproduce. But as the project evolved, I realised that Braille is a real problem. It is often taken as a symbol of accessibility, even though it affects around 10% of blind and partially sighted people. To illustrate, if you put Braille signs in a lift, they will be used by 10% of blind and partially sighted people, with the other 90% getting by. And from time to time we find Braille signs mounted upside down, i.e. illegible for a blind person.
The third area is education. In terms of everyday inclusiveness, Braille is competing with more recent audio technologies. On the one hand, these discussions neglect multiple sensory disabilities, i.e. the blind and hard of hearing. On the other hand, for school-age children, Braille is the mastery of the written word, in other words, the minimum condition for being able to attend a normal school.
Some people see collaborative manufacturing as a means of empowerment by putting oneself into a project. Do you have any examples of "power development" and "self-projecting" experienced through BrailleRAP?
In the midst of the multitude of open source projects, BrailleRAP has a real distinctive feature. The “beneficiaries” of the machine can't make it – it's still too complex to be accessible. On the other hand, the people who assemble the embossing machine cannot read Braille. This means that everyone is partially disabled:
- The beginner maker realises that they can make a useful machine with strong social significance.
- The experienced maker realises that they need someone to validate the operation of the machine he or she has just finished.
- The blind person who validates the Braille impresses the makers with their ability to decode Braille with touch.
Starting up a BrailleRAP at the end of the workshop is always a moment of catharsis when all the participants realise the power of the collective. Without their personal contribution, it doesn't work, and without the contribution of others, it doesn't work either. We go completely beyond the technical object that is BrailleRAP to move into the human, the awareness of ourselves and others.
What are BrailleRAP's plans for the near future?
Ever since we started working seriously on embossing graphics, I realised that the A4 format of the historical BrailleRAP was a bit limited. So BrailleRAP now comes in two models, the historical BrailleRAP which can emboss up to A4 format, and the BrailleRAP XL which can emboss up to A3 format. As for software, funding from NGI means that we can concentrate on development. DesktopBrailleRAP can now be used to create page layouts by mixing vector graphics and Braille text.
In the short term, there will be Linux versions of both AccessBrailleRAP and DesktopBrailleRAP, which will broaden the range of possibilities and subjects that can be addressed in workshops. The projects also include software for downloading OpenStreetMap data under free licences and producing tactile maps of underground stations, campuses and crossroads.
In terms of major events, we're currently preparing a mission to Réunion Island in partnership with local associations and a local fab lab. And we're looking for funding to carry out experiments as an extension of BrailleRAP Cameroon, in Congo, Senegal, Tanzania, etc. We're also in regular contact with associations for the visually impaired in France and Europe, so there's certainly a lot to explore.
Read the first interview in the series: CryptPad on how it balances accessibility and privacy for secure digital collaboration
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).