A blind Palestinian inventor claims to have made a breakthrough for the visually-impaired. Sammer Abu Al Rub improved Braille letters and his method is having a real impact on children in his native Gaza.
Sammer Abu Al Rub went blind seven years ago due to a genetic disorder. But he didn't give up teaching – though he changed his job, moving to a school for the blind.
It's there that he developed his method.
“A young student of mine inspired me. He was very hard-working, and was trying to read Braille letters with his very poor eyesight. But Braille writing is tiny. So I enlarged it, and simplified the letters to make them easier to work with,” Sammer Abu Al Rub explains.
Sammer says he is happy that the new technique was a success and has helped many youngsters, and that he hopes there will soon be many more people using his method.
“I hope my technique will reach every single blind person. And I want to improve it in the near future to make it include various lights and sounds," he adds.
After winning a contest in Palestine, the inventor received several thousand dollars to continue working on his invention, but he says the money is not enough to get it into mass production.