Gregory Hargraves
Creating a low-cost, multi-line braille display to improve braille literacy worldwide
Project
Paige Braille
URL
Location
East of England
Theme
Technology
Creating a low-cost, multi-line braille display to improve braille literacy worldwide
Bioengineering graduate Gregory Hargraves had his business idea after the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust approached him with a problem.
While audio options have improved access for the blind, braille is still crucial for spelling, grammar, punctuation and maths, as well as for learning non-phonetic languages like English. However, most existing braille displays are limited to a single line of text and are incredibly expensive.
Gregory started Paige Braille to create a product that would enable affordable access to braille and transform braille literacy worldwide.
The company is creating a multi-line braille display, which uses novel design to drastically reduce the cost per character. This enables Paige Braille to create ten lines, each with 20 characters of braille, which can be used for reading, writing or maths.
Gregory hopes the dedicated business support from the Young Innovators Award will help the business with its next phase:
“We have a strong engineering background as a team, but the business support and advice offered by the Young Innovators Award is going to be invaluable to us. We’re facing lots of challenges as we scale so the programme’s insight and expertise will help us to put Paige in the hands of braille users.”
