COOBRA – Participatory Research Project
Cooperation without barriers between sighted and visually impaired people
COOBRA (Cooperation between sighted people and visually impaired people who use Braille) aims to overcome a major barrier: enabling sighted people and blind or visually impaired people to learn and work together on complex documents (tables, graphs, equations).
Fact: Persistent inequality in access to information
In higher education, as in many professions, people with visual impairments face indirect discrimination: they do not have the same access to documents, nor the same ability to create or annotate them.
Why? Current tools all have limitations:
- Braille: highly reliable, allows for character-by-character verification, careful proofreading, and structured navigation. But learning it is demanding, and its use is declining.
- Text-to-speech: fast and convenient, but often imprecise, allowing neither careful proofreading nor detailed verification.
- Generative AI (ChatGPT, etc.): offers “natural” access to information, but produces errors (“hallucinations”) and is not 100% reliable.
Result: blind people are slowed down, dependent on imperfect tools, and often excluded from real-time collaboration with sighted colleagues.
The COOBRA approach: combining the best of spoken and written communication
Our premise is simple: Braille and text-to-speech should not be pitted against each other, but rather intelligently integrated.
- Braille for accuracy, proofreading, and structured navigation.
- Text-to-speech for agility, speed, and exploration.
COOBRA designs hybrid solutions that allow users to switch seamlessly between the two, depending on their needs and the context.
A unique approach: participatory research
The people involved here are not test subjects. They are full-fledged members of the research team.
Active participants include:
- People who are blind or visually impaired (whether or not they use Braille)
- Braille experts
- Students and teachers
- Researchers in computer science, cognitive science, and design
- Developers of digital assistants
Together, they co-create, test, and improve the tools in real-world settings.
Ultimate goal: real-time cooperation
Beyond simple reading and writing, COOBRA aims to enable:
- The co-creation of complex documents between a sighted person and a visually impaired person
- Real-time co-editing (similar to a shared Google Docs document)
- Collaborative proofreading without wasting time or losing information
Our vision: that visual impairment will never again be a barrier to professional or educational collaboration.