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For nearly a century, the National Braille Press has churned out millions of pages of Braille books and magazines a year, providing a window on the world for generations of blind people.
But as it turns 90 this year, the Boston-based printing press and other advocates of the tactile writing system are wrestling with how to address record low Braille literacy.
Roughly 13 percent of U.S. blind students were considered Braille readers in a 2016 survey by the American Printing House for the Blind, another major Braille publisher, located in Louisville, Kentucky. That number has steadily dropped from around 30 percent in 1974, the first year the organization started asking the question.
Brian Mac Donald, president of the National Braille Press, says the modern blind community needs easier and more affordable ways to access the writing system developed in the 1800s by French teacher Louis Braille.
For the National Braille Press and its 1960-era Heidelberg presses, that has meant developing and launching its own electronic Braille reader last year—the B2G .
Hope it catches on. We need somebody who can read the last copy of the Bible after the apocalypse.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:55AM (11 children)
While it was a good system for a long time, is there any more need for Braille?
As far as I can tell, computers have removed the need for Braille. With the exception graphic designers that still think there is a need for images replacing text, computers and web browsers can easily read content off the internet. Even cheap smart phones can perform this ability.
Smart phones, tablets, and computers equipped with an e-reader can also read books aloud for the blind.
Which is more cost-effective? Teaching blind people braille and all the costs associated with a special printing process, or using the same e-books that already exist with existing and cheap software on inexpensive devices?
Hence, how relevant is Braille in the modern world?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Whoever on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:03AM (5 children)
Have you ever tried using a computer with a screen reader such as JAWS? It's a very frustrating experience, even if you can see the screen and use the mouse to move the pointer to the appropriate place on the screen.
Meanwhile, braille is like paper printouts. How about if people suggested doing away with printers for sighted people.
The downside of braille is that is is difficult to learn: especially to write, because it employs many contractions, which must be memorized.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:17AM
Oh God, those contractions. In addition to the 26 letters, you have 10 times that in contractions (or at least it feels like that). When I was trying to learn braille to relate to my blind family, I just could not get the knack of that. Probably because I can still see and the lack of brain plasticity means I'd need more practice. Interesting fact, studies show that the more blind you are the faster you can read braille because the Occipital lobe gets reassigned to processing tactile sensations; also, other reassignments can also allow blind people to use echolocation.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 02 2017, @05:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:33AM (1 child)
Yes please. Printers suck.
There used to be technology "right around the corner" to build displays with inflatable bubbles so they could have braille or raised UI elements. Haven't heard about it in many a year, though. It probably got lost with all those techs to make batteries last 10× as long or that one that lets you pee on your phone to charge it.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:13PM
Electronic Braille devices exist and have done so for a few years.
They are very expensive though and most blind people are poor.
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:25PM
The problems with JAWS aren't solved by Braille either. Braille terminals are a thing, but you still have the problem of condensing 1080p worth of pixels into 40 or 80 columns of text. Figuring out what window has focus, what part of the window to read & when, etc. The same hints that developers *can* include for screen readers would help Braille terminals, but it takes development time and is hard to get right.
Unless you have a blind person using a screen reader or Braille terminal daily during development of your app, it's unlikely you'll hint the app enough to make is useful. I'd compare it to web development in the bad old days when a dev targeted IE only and didn't care about standards or any other browser. Odds the page loaded on anything else are about the same as an app written by only sighted people being accessible to a screen reader or Braille terminal.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:33AM
Aside from the fact that no one bothers to write actual web-pages anymore so it often fails spectacularly, even when it works, it's not the same as literacy.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:37AM (2 children)
Can you imagine ... oh, the horror... in this world, there are some hundred of languages, not all of them (I could even say most of them not) having a synthesized voice for screen readers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:34PM (1 child)
Google understands 119 voices [www.blog.google] in speech-to-text. Presumably text-to-speech is easier and more supported. You need about 400 languages to cover 94% of the population [cmu.edu].
I wonder how many of the 6900 languages are similar enough to each other that a TTS engine for one could muddle through several others. If you throw French at a Spanish TTS, it sounds funny, but I think you'd be able to understand enough of it to get by. Either that or you've got a Monty Python sketch in the making...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:45PM
I wish to return this tobacconists. It is scratched.
(Score: 2) by Popeidol on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:52AM
You're right that text-to-speech has been amazing, and has made it much easier for people with a vision impairment to get information and communicate. No arguments there, and when you can get 95% of what they need with a shallow learning curve why would you spend years mastering a specific skill to get the final 5%?
The issue is more the side effects. The first you'll notice is spelling: If your whole life has been taking in text by audio you tend to spell fairly phonetically. Autocorrect may eventually fix this, but it's not there yet. Speech-to-text can help with that but has a host of its own issues (Try sending a sensitive email in an open-plan office). Braille also covers more than just text - There's specific annotations for maths, musical scores, and more.
I think braille is doomed to a slow death, even if good braille displays dropped from a few thousand to zero overnight. I don't believe that audio can replace its uses completely, however cost effective it is. If we're lucky it may still be a net gain for the people using it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:58AM (4 children)
In the early 1980s a friend worked with this amazing blind, self-taught engineer in Hull/Ottawa Canada, Roland Galarneau:
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/braille/braille_his.html [www.ieee.ca]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:51AM (2 children)
in 1970, at a time when computer chips did not yet exist.
That's an odd thing for the IEEE to say. There was only one microprocessor [wikipedia.org] on the market in 1970:
However, there were logic ICs available, RTL [wikipedia.org]:
DTL and TTL [computerhistory.org]
> It took 1,000 relays and more than 100,000 connections before the computer operated properly.
The article says the designer studied electronics. It's odd that he built an electromechanical computer when electronic computers had been in use for 24 years.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:02AM (1 child)
I think the mechanical element was for stamping the braille output.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:30AM
I don't think so. The article says "It took 1,000 relays and more than 100,000 connections before the computer operated properly."
(Score: 2) by pendorbound on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:40PM
It's "linked to a teletype machine which fed its memory" but "It scanned and translated texts". This thing couldn't have done OCR, could it? It had to have been more like a Braille printer, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:10AM (5 children)
No, the real question is whether the drop in Braille literacy is trending with the general drop in literacy in the population at large. Text-to-speech has been a boon to the non-sighted. But the sighted have no such excuse, other than that they are too lazy to learn to read. So give us stats: More blind people not using Braille than sighted people now using emoticons? Or words are hard, wall of text, tl:dr. I r stupid.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:58AM (3 children)
We have emoji ∴ literacy 📉.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:57AM (2 children)
You know, I can tell you are using emojis, but while I can read text at my current monitor resolution, I cannot tell if the cheese on your cheeseburger emoji is under the bun (google) or on top of the bun (apple), or recursively layered in a directory (unix). So, could you use your words, or, get off my lawn? (Wait, that wasn't a "lawn" emoji, was it? Is there a "lawn" emoji? Can you get off it?)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:04AM
🌱🌱🌱🚜
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:32AM
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:39PM
Illiteracy is a virtue to be sought after. If the president can have illiteracy, then everyone else should be equally entitled to halve it two. Eye suppose that explains the appointment of the secretary of education. Hour country should also have innumeracy as whale.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:45PM
Since I don't expect to ever need to use Braille I don't have any opinion.
But I would point out that like Braille, other skills have become unnecessary in the past. And we got by just fine. Telegraph operator. Telephone switchboard operator. Horse and buggy driver. Government Ethics Chief. Fact Checker. School teacher. Scientist. Engineer.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @05:58PM
I used to think it would be cool to be able to lie in bed and read a book without any light source. No more sleep-blurred vision forcing me to sleep before I finish that book I can't put down!
So I thought, hey, I should learn braille... so I started looking at dots. Well, that's not the right skill, so I looked into how much a braille display would cost. Wow! How the hell could anyone afford that!?
I still think it would be cool to have a braille keyboard/display combo that I could use to read/write, but they're just too expensive. Think of the battery life your laptop could get if it used one... I'd even settle for some sort of Arduino-based thing that had to be synced to a computer to push/get text documents.