From Research Laboratory to the Market: the Experience of TypeInBraille

While the research for assistive technologies is an active field since the middle ′70, new challenges and opportunities arose in the last years, due to the diffusion of accessible mobile and pervasive devices. Despite a significant research effort was devoted to develop a number of working prototypes, only a few of them became actual products from which final users could take advantage. This is due to two intertwined reasons: first, the legitimate goal of researchers in this field is to devise solutions, rather than develop them for distribution to end users. The second reason is that a great effort is required to deploy a final product starting from a research prototype. In this contribution we want to share the experience of our team that, starting from the scientific research conducted in the university laboratory “EveryWare Lab”, develops applications and commercializes them through the spin-off called “EveryWare Technologies”. In particular, we will focus on TypeInBraille, an application that allows visually impaired persons to type on touchscreen devices using Braille encoding.