Shubham Banerjee is an inventor — he's just invented a low-cost printer that will make reading more accessible for the blind. He also happens to be in the 8th grade.
Banerjee recalls a time in 2013 when his family received a leaflet asking for donations to resources for blind Americans. "For a moment I closed my eyes and wondered, 'What would I do if I was blind?' " he says. "I thought about all the things I would miss, like my friends' faces, a football game, reading a book." It was that last one that struck him most.
Curious about how a blind person might read, Banerjee entered his query into the Google search bar. He discovered that braille printers, which make reading accessible for people who are blind, can cost an individual upwards of $2,000. "There had to be a better option," he recalls thinking. "That sort of inspired me to try and build a new one."
And he did.
Over the course of the next couple years, Banerjee constructed a design for a low-cost braille printer (out of LEGOs, no less) that would provide a more affordable way to read to over 200 million blind people.
"Inventing is cool because you don't really need a factory, you don't have to be a certain age — you can be whatever you want to be," he says. "As long as you have the right tools to do it, the right people to seek out, there's nothing you can't do."
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