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: 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?