Sask. Grade 12 student's affordable braille device receives national accolades

A Grade 12 student at Walter Murray Collegiate in Saskatoon is being recognized for creating an innovative device to help blind and deaf people communicate.

Joti Gokeraju said he was inspired after visiting his grandfather in India.

"My grandpa is a very jovial person. He likes to call a lot and talk to us a lot. But when I went there, I was surprised to see him not as talkative, and I found out it was because he was slowly losing his hearing," Gokeraju said.

He started thinking of what it would be like if he not only lost his hearing, but his eyesight as well.

"This would mean we would lose the ability to communicate with him completely," he said. "This was a really scary reality." 

Once he got back to Canada, Gokeraju started researching blind and deaf resources, and found that there are around 160 million people who are either visually impaired or hearing impaired. He wanted to do something to help.

"I really only started working on it in 2023," he said.

He gives a lot of credit to his teachers, who let him work on parts of the invention as class projects. He said he explained to his teachers how passionate he was about the idea.

"They gave me the green light. So I went ahead," he said. "After school I would spend a few hours on it every day, and that went on for about a year until I could actually finish my prototype."

The prototype for his braille device was more cost-effective than other devices on the market — the display costs $99 instead of several thousand.

All the translations in Gokeraju's device are automated.

"In a normal system, you'll need someone who already knows how to convert English to Braille in order to talk to a deaf and blind person," he said. "But in this system I can just record myself in English or French and all of that translation is done automatically."

Gokeraju has already won an engineering innovation award and a gold medal at a national science fair for his work.

He said he's happy to be recognized, but the project out there is more important to him.

"I want to be able to give this to every deaf and blind person around the world. It's great to get the word out there because that really helps in the process," he said.

"When you don't have access to resources, it becomes very difficult for you to actually interact in society and have normal conversations," he said.

Gokeraju said he is currently working on a provisional patent application and hopes to have the device patented soon.