Touchable Ink: New hope for blind readers

Being unable to see is hard enough. A lack of reading materials shouldn't make it harder. Now there is hope that a cheap new technology developed here in Thailand can replace those hard-to-find and very expensive Braille printers.

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In fact, there are only a few hundred Braille printers scattered around Thailand and printing even a single page can be difficult and expensive. Here, in an excerpt from a much longer story in today's Life section, Bangkok Post writer Kanin Srimaneekulroj reports on a new, much simpler process. You can read the full story here: http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/social-and-lifestyle/976393/inking-in-progress

Inking in progress

Kanin Srimaneekulroj

In what could potentially be a life-changing breakthrough for visually-impaired individuals the world over, veteran advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT) Thailand has recently unveiled their Touchable Ink project, a CSR initiative to develop a special kind of ink that – when exposed to appropriate levels of heat – will rise up from the page, allowing conventional, household printers to replace expensive dedicated Braille printers.

Developed in conjunction with Thammasat University's Faculty of Science and Technology with support from Samsung, the Touchable Ink project is the latest effort in JWT's continued mission to develop innovative solutions to the problems facing our society, according to chief creative officer Satit Jantawiwat.

Students from the School for the Blind test-reading a document printed in Touchable Ink.

The science behind the ink is actually rather simple, involving the addition of embossing powder – a cheap, commonly-sold material – into a regular printer ink cartridge. Users can then print out any document or picture as they would normally, before applying heat to the ink to make it swell up from the page. According to Satit, the heat produced by household products like hairdryers, clothing irons or microwaves will do just fine.

"We wanted to create an affordable alternative for blind people to get access to Braille," he said.

"Our goal is to design an ink that can be used with any type of printer you may have at home, no matter the price or brand. We decided to work on the ink instead of creating a new type of printer, as we wanted to make this technology affordable for everyone."

"Before, subjects that rely heavily on visual diagrams like geometry have been all but impossible for blind people to fully grasp," added Satit. "But the ability to print out diagrams for them to feel with their fingers can help bridge this gap in access to education as well. We printed out outlines of countries and dinosaurs for the children at trial schools, and they were all very well received."

The ink can also be printed out and stuck to bottles and boxes as well.

While still currently under development, Satit believes that the Touchable Ink technology will be able to negate the most glaring issues facing traditional Braille printing, namely those of cost and time.

"Right now, Thailand only has the capacity to print several hundred Braille books per year, says Suthat Pungsiripattana, vice-president of Thailand's Association of the Blind. This means that even the libraries offered by the Association of the Blind tend to hold very few books, and even those they do have tend to be on a long waiting list."

From left, Suthat Pungsiripattana, Parattajariya Jalayanateja and Satit Jantawiwat.

Parattajariya Jalayanateja, managing director of JWT emphasised that the ink is very much still in development, and can still take several months of work before it reaches a stage in which it can be sold on the market.

"We tested our ink for several different factors, such as the thickness of the swelling or the ink's adherence to the paper," he explained.

"The ideal threshold for the thickness is about 0.1mm. While the ink has proven to have no problems sticking to the paper, at it's current stage, the results of using the ink in conventional printers aren't quite consistent enough yet. It still takes us about seven to eight tries to get a perfect copy."

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