Graphs Accessible to Blind

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an approach that streamlines the design process for tactile chart designers. Their program, called “Tactile Vega-Lite,” can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one.

The tool could make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand many graphics, such as a bar chart comparing minimum wages across states or a line graph tracking countries’ GDPs over time. To bring your designs to the real world, you can tweak your chart in Tactile Vega-Lite and then send its file to a Braille embosser (which prints text as readable dots).

More information:

https://news.mit.edu/2025/making-graphs-more-accessible-blind-low-vision-readers-0325

Plant Leaf Poking Sensor Checks Stress

The sooner a farmer knows that their crops are suffering, the faster they can take action to prevent major crop failure. A new plant-leaf-poking sensor could soon help them do so, by sending an alert as soon as the plant gets stressed. Plants of all types continuously produce hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as part of natural processes such as photosynthesis and respiration. They produce higher amounts of the chemical when they're stressed, however, as a means of sending signals between cells to activate their defense mechanisms. Stressors causing this reaction can include drought, pest damage, and infections. Researchers at Iowa State University developed a flat, flexible polymer patch with array of tiny gold-coated microneedles along its underside.

When the sensor is pressed onto a plant's leaf, the microneedles harmlessly pierce the very top layer of tissue, encountering the sap contained within. The greater the amount of hydrogen peroxide that is present in that liquid, the greater the number of electrons produced, and thus the stronger the measured electrical signal. If that signal is strong enough to indicate that trouble is brewing, a hardwired battery/electronics module will send an alert to the farmer's mobile device via Bluetooth, or to their home computer via Wi-Fi or existing wireless networks. In tests performed on soybean and tobacco plants, the sensor differentiated between healthy plants and those that had recently been infected with the bacterial.

More information:

https://newatlas.com/science/leaf-sensor-plant-stress/