Most technology is built for sighted people first, then patched to work for everyone else.

We build it the other way around.

6DotsLab researches and builds software and hardware for people who get through the world without sight. We're not trying to recreate vision. We're trying to understand how people actually do things without it, then build tools around that.

We're engineers, cognitive scientists, and designers. Several of us are blind or have low vision ourselves.

Students testing a braille learning keyboard beside a laptop display. — Live classroom testing

A group of students gathered around a laptop and tactile keyboard during a braille lesson. — Guided braille practice

Hands pressing a tactile keyboard connected to a braille learning prototype. — Hands-on input

A student receiving support while testing a braille keyboard and accessible learning screen. — Feedback in context

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The Problem

Bangladesh has an estimated 950,000 blind people, and roughly 4 million people living with some degree of visual impairment. Most of them will never learn to read.

Braille literacy comes down to three things: a device to write on, a teacher who knows Braille, and material to read. In Bangladesh, all three are scarce. A refreshable Braille display can cost more than $10,000, more than most families, schools, or public libraries will ever spend on one child's education. Even where schools do exist, most teachers have never been trained to teach Braille.

This isn't just a Bangladesh problem. In India, home to roughly a fifth of the world's blind population, only about 1% of blind people are Braille literate. The same gaps in cost, teacher training, and available materials show up across Pakistan, Uganda, Afghanistan, and beyond.

The tools that exist to fix this were built for institutions that can afford a $10,000 device. Most schools can't. That's the gap we're building for.

Bangladesh

950,000

Estimated blind people in Bangladesh

Visual impairment

4 million

People living with some degree of visual impairment

Device cost

$10,000+

Cost of many refreshable Braille displays

Braille literacy

Approximate Braille literacy among blind people in India

What We Believe

Most "accessible" technology starts as a sighted product with a screen reader bolted onto it after the fact. That's why so much of it feels added on, not built in.

Blind and low-vision people don't experience a broken version of the sighted world. They get through it using sound, touch, and memory, often faster and more accurately than sight would manage the same task. We think technology should be designed around that from the start, not translated for it later.

That's what we work on.

How We Work

We work directly with blind people at every stage of a project, not just at the end to check our work.

It starts before we design anything. We sit down with blind users and talk through the real problem: what's hard right now, what's already been tried, where existing tools fall short. Only then do we start building.

The first version is always rough. We hand it to the same people, watch how they actually use it, and note what doesn't work. Then we fix it and hand it back. Most of our products go through 10 rounds of this before we call them finished.

6DotsLab

A workspace for blind-first braille learning and accessible technology.

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