Mastodawn

Braille is literacy.

Many people think it can be substituted by speech synthesis, by audiobooks, by other things. It can't.

Voice is serial, it unfolds in time. It requires working memory. Braille is static. It unfolds in space, remains stable in time. It backs working memory, does not consume it. For things that require pinning down relationships (mathematics, music, programming) braile has clear advantages.

This is not to say people can't manage without it. I don't always use a braille display. But it makes things better: learning, accuracy, performance, speed.

Witholding braille from blind people is withholding literacy, it's denying capacity.

Don't fucking do that.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@modulux
I read books, but can't stand audio books.

A radio/audio play is a different thing.

I set up several hundred public domain books with TTS on an android tablet for my friend that's going blind. He appreciated it, but it doesn't replace reading.

Also even Google and Amazon's best AI TTS isn't even close to a human narrator for fiction. Non mainstream names and places fail. SF&F etc is even worse.

I don't know if he's going to learn braille.

We have thousands of touch sensors.

@raymaccarthy It's not usually easy to learn braille for an adult, and getting braille printed books is complicated (they take up considerably more space). Braille displays are devices which plug into computers and can produce a line or two of braille on demand, dynamically. the problem is they're very expensive for complicated reasons involving scale of manufacture.

I hope the best for your friend; whether braille ends up being a part of it or not.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@modulux
Yes, I know what a Braille display is. I considered designing one in 1990s based on dotmatrix print head ideas.

I assume, maybe wrongly, that a embossed label maker like a Dymo, exists, using wider tape, to print Braille labels by hand. Maybe there are computer based ones too.

It's increasingly hard to learn new alphabets, Morse code and languages as you get older. So I'd assumed this was true of Braille.

He has macular degeneration & got him a video camera some years ago. No use.

@raymaccarthy Right, there are braille dymo printers, I've never heard of computer-based ones, but manual ones, sure. The tape is thicker and wider and the printer is bigger.

And yes, with braille it's not just the normal mental plasticity issues of learning a new script, but also the sensorial issues of learning to read with a sense you haven't used for that before; and for some people even being able to tell the dots apart can be a challenge.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@modulux
Hacking a manual one to work off a PC wouldn't be hard. Geared stepper motor to turn dial (if it's like a dymo), solenoid to punch and a sensor for one position (such as cut).

No driver needed. Emulate USB serial with €5 PIC micro.

Or make from scratch. You only need one column of punches and advance tape small amount in character and several times for character space.

Is it really only 2 columns and 3 rows? I guess once it was invented only the tiniest changes were possible.

@raymaccarthy In general yes, 2 columns, 3 rows, 6 dots altogether. Though there's computer braille which has 8 dots (2 columns, 4 rows). Most characters are the same but the lowest row is typically used for special characters and such.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@modulux
I since looked it up on Wikipedia, which didn't exist the last time I looked at Braille, same year as we got Web based Internet (1994).
Baudot was also a French invention , about 40 years after Braille (1870s). Changed in 1901 for typewriter style instead of piano key punch. It's for telegraph, though the first modern Telegraph that the computer keyboard is based on was 1928.
It's only 5 bits, but like Braille it has shift codes.
Both Baudot-Murray and ASCII has all holes for DEL.

mirabilos Jan 4

@modulux @raymaccarthy we should learn this in school. And by we I mean everyone.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@mirabilos @modulux
Braille, Typing, Morse and a 2nd common live language from age 7.
Don't waste effort on supposed Latin roots (USA), fake grammar / spelling rules or "Phonetics"(UK). Or Spelling Bees.
No marks off on essays or summaries for grammar, punctuation, dialect or spelling. Keep those for Language class, not Literature.

mirabilos Jan 4

@raymaccarthy @modulux not familiar enough with english school systems to comment on most (though I am glad I took Latin from age 10 on). Morse… I don’t know, would be useful, but I wonder if it’s not possible to use the plasticity of the younger age to teach other alphabets. I self-taught me the Greek one and now know half of Cyrillic or so, enough to get by in Bosnia anyway, but I wonder if getting kids to read Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic, just the scripts, would not be worth it.

At least from a local PoV. I know for the USA the figures are bad (75% read no better than a sixth-grader, 25% are practical analphabets).

As for the second live language, I know they’ve started teaching english in elementary school some time (~20 years?) ago.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@mirabilos @modulux
USA: Spanish & English
Ireland, Scotland & Wales: English, Local and a main Europe language.
England: English, French and 1 other European.
Greek & Cyrillic easier and more use than Arabic alphabet. Mandarin maybe more useful. Maybe easier than Arabic (learn 5000 symbols is 5000 words). We really learn words. Not much point in learning an alphabet without the words. I sort of learnt three additional alphabets and the one where I learned words too is the only one of use.

mirabilos Jan 4

@raymaccarthy @modulux nah, it makes it easier to pick up one of the languages later if you know the alphabet, but more importantly, things like signs, the menu at eateries, etc. and also labels on import products, communication with package delivery people whose $local_language is insufficient, …

mirabilos Jan 4

@raymaccarthy @modulux plus, for kids, could be fun trying to write one’s own language in the other alphabets (and abjad) as a game.

For arabic, even getting a bare idea how to read it early (RTL, shapes and ligatures and how to split the mesial forms again, and vocals) would be useful, because trying to understand these things later is hard.

CJK on the other hand is pure memorisation. (Which I hate, even did as kid already, but still.) Much more effort for much less gain.

Ray McCarthy Jan 4

@mirabilos @modulux
Maybe, but learning the language is many magnitudes harder than the alphabet. Arabic is a special case worse than Hebrew due to more forms of the same letter depending on if start, median, end and what letters connect.
Unless you want to read the Koran or live in an Arab dictatorship, it is far less important than Mandarin. I've never had to get Arabic translated.

mirabilos Jan 4

@raymaccarthy @modulux precisely because it is such a special case.

And, no, there are many more sites in life where I encounter different writing systems (even just OpenStreetMap, but also when travelling).

mirabilos Jan 4

@raymaccarthy @modulux could even help dyslexics, though I’m not an expert on that, but AIUI it’s a shape/similarity thing.

Brodeuse LucileDT Jan 5

@mirabilos @modulux @raymaccarthy same with sign language. I'm so angry that it's not taught in school to everyone!

mirabilos Jan 5

@luciledt @modulux @raymaccarthy right!