We built a braille camera that never sends your photos anywhere
A lot of braille translation tools start from the wrong place. You type in the Unicode braille characters, you get a reading. Useful for developers building accessibility pipelines, less useful for someone standing at a train station wondering what the handrail says.
TenjiScan does one thing: point your iPhone camera at braille, get text. On-device, offline, no account, no photo upload.
Why the on-device constraint matters
The privacy consideration wasn't an afterthought. When you're photographing a pill box, a medication label, or something on a person's belongings, you probably don't want those images going to an external API. As of v4.0.0, the entire pipeline runs on-device — nothing leaves your phone.
We built on top of Vision with a custom two-signal pipeline for detecting and interpreting braille dot patterns. The app handles Japanese braille (JIS standard) and English braille (UEB Grade 1) — the everyday kind you find on train handrails, elevator buttons, and product packaging.
What it doesn't do yet
Grade 2 contracted braille — the kind that uses abbreviations to compress meaning into fewer cells — isn't supported. Grade 1 only, standard cell-by-cell transcription.
Accuracy also depends on lighting and angle. Flat surface, even lighting, camera roughly parallel to the surface: that's the sweet spot. Steep angles and harsh shadows degrade results noticeably. We document this in the app description rather than glossing over it.
The actual use case
The people who find it most useful usually aren't studying braille. They're curious. A commuter who's ridden the same line for years and finally wants to know what the handrail says. Someone at a pharmacy wondering what's on the side of the box.
Ambient curiosity about text that's been there all along — that's the use case. Narrow, but real.
Try it
Free to download. One-time ad-removal purchase, no subscription.
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