2 days ago
Johns Hopkins students invent braille label printer for local brewery & visually impaired workers
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 team of students made it happen.
"On our team 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," said Catherine Pollard, a recent 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 said, 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," asked 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 wanted to have a braille label on our beer can."
The students took a few 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 team also developed the software 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 few applications that BISM wanted 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 wanted to have an automated process and a more accessible process, where you didn't have to be sighted to line up the label," said 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 always get to see on the time scale of one year,' said Pollard.
According to Johns Hopkins, the students have already printed 400 labels for Blind Spot, a beer crafted by Baltimore's own Checkerspot Brewing Company in collaboration with BISM as part of an annual fundraiser 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 1,000 labels for their next fundraising event in 2026.
