Johns Hopkins students invent braille label printer for local brewery & visually impaired workers
Click here for updates on this story BALTIMORE WJZ A group of engineering students at Johns Hopkins University put their invention skills to work and delivered by building a printer that can add braille to beer labels It s a tool that can also be operated by blind or visually impaired people This isn t an ordinary beer can label It comes from a machine that can print beer can labels in braille And a organization of students made it happen On our organization this year It was myself Catherine and then my other teammates were Sophia Gabriella and Crystal and we re all seniors or we were all seniors in the Johns Hopkins mechanical engineering department declared Catherine Pollard a fresh mechanical engineering graduate of Johns Hopkins University Pollard explained that she spent part of her last semester creating this one-of-a-kind braille beer can label printer for Blind Industries Services of Maryland BISM We disclosed can you come up with an automated process to feed a roll of labels through a printer and put the Braille on that label exactly where we need it appealed Mike Gosse the president of BISM the state s largest employer of blind and low-visioned workers But how do we put Braille on other packaging and particularly cylindrical objects We needed to do this partly for our upcoming braille beer event where we wished to have a braille label on our beer can The students took a scarce months to design and build a machine capable of punching braille text into plastic beer labels as well as card stock glossy mailers and other materials that commercial braille-friendly printers can t do Pollard and her organization also developed the platform that allows a printer to communicate with a braille word processor which the nonprofit can use in its office to create plastic labels Our goals for the project were defined by the requirements that we had So there were a insufficient applications that BISM sought to use the printer in One of these was printing rolls of labels Another one was printing large sheets of paper explained Pollard A printer for the visually impaired Not only are the labels printed in braille but the students designed it so that BISM employees with no or low vision can operate it But we sought to have an automated process and a more accessible process where you didn t have to be sighted to line up the label explained Gosse Accessibility means that blind people can go out and you can do almost every job that a sighted person can do and that s why we want to make sure that when we think about everything we do here at BISM I think we delivered something that would improve their lives and that s not something that you invariably get to see on the time scale of one year declared Pollard According to Johns Hopkins the students have already printed labels for Blind Spot a beer crafted by Baltimore s own Checkerspot Brewing Company in collaboration with BISM as part of an annual fundraising event for those with vision loss The new printer will save BISM employees from having to use a manual press to punch braille dots into more than labels for their next fundraising event in Please note This content carries a strict local sector embargo If you share the same field as the contributor of this article you may not use it on any platform Source
