Braille Embosser

A braille embosser is a printer, necessarily an impact printer, that renders text as tactile braille cells. Using braille translation software, a document can be embossed with relative ease, making braille production much more efficient and cost-effective.

Blind users tend to call other printers "ink printers", to distinguish them from their braille counterparts. This is often the case regardless of the type of printer being discussed (e.g., thermal printers being called "ink printers" even though they use no ink).

As with ink printers and presses, embossers range from those intended for consumers to those used by large publishers. Thus, an embosser can cost roughly anywhere from US$2,000 to $80,000, depending on the user's needs.

The fastest industrial braille embosser is probably the $77,000 Belgian-made "NV Interpoint 55", first produced in 1991, which uses a separate air compressor to drive the embossing head and can output up to 800 braille characters per second. Adoption was slow at first; in 2000 the National Federation of the Blind said there were only 3 of these in the USA, one owned by the NFB itself and the other two by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society . As of 2008 there are more than 60 in use across the world .

But the mostly used production embossers in the world are still Braillo Norway embossers " Braillo 400SR, Braillo 440SW and the latest being Braillo 650 SW and Braillo 650SF". They have the only embossers with staking unit and with Staple and fold Unit which produces books at a speed of 650 braille characters per second and a finished book.

Smaller (and slower) braille embossers are more common and can be found in some libraries, universities, and specialist education centres, as well as being privately owned by some blind individuals. Particularly with some lower-priced embossers, it is sometimes necessary to mount the embosser on its own table, as otherwise the vibrations can damage the computer by eventually causing microchips and other components to come loose from the circuit boards.

Braille embossers usually need special braille paper which is thicker and more expensive than normal paper. Some high-end embossers are capable of printing on normal paper. Embossers can be either one-sided or two-sided. Duplex embossing requires lining up the dots so they do not overlap (called "interpoint" because the points on the other side are placed in between the points on the first side).

Once one copy of a document has been produced, printing further copies is often quicker by means of a device called a "thermoform", which produces copies on soft plastic. However the resulting braille is not as easily readable as braille that has been freshly embossed, in much the same way that a poor-quality photocopy is not as readable as the original. Hence large publishers do not generally use thermoforms.