Braille printers normally cost about $1,500, so this team built one for under $15 from a cheap 3D printer. Feed it any document and it punches the whole thing out in braille, even describing the pictures in plain words.

During the start of Treehacks, we chatted with a fellow builder who described corresponding with her visually-impaired pen pal: She types her message on her computer, and then manually punches the braille, letter by letter, on a sheet of paper to send over. Why does she do this? Braille printers are outrageously expensive due to the high degree of precision required and the niche market. Due to the high cost, many who seek to print braille documents instead manually punch each letter with a specialized hole puncher. This struggle extends far beyond personal correspondence-it highlights a critical gap in education for the visually impaired.