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Technology Seeks to Preserve Fading Skill: Braille Literacy

posted by martyb on Thursday November 02 2017, @03:30AM   
from the BraileToSpeech++ dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A Kindle for the Blind:

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.

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Original Submission

• Re:The Converto-Braille Re:The Converto-Braille (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:51AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:51AM (#590886)

  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:

  The AL1 was an 8-bit bit slice which contained eight registers and an arithmetic logic unit (ALU). It was implemented using four-phase logic and used over a thousand gates, with an area of 130 by 120 mils. The chip was described in an April 1970 article in Computer Design magazine.

  However, there were logic ICs available, RTL [wikipedia.org]:

  RTL circuits were first constructed with discrete components, but in 1961 it became the first digital logic family to be produced as a monolithic integrated circuit.

  DTL and TTL [computerhistory.org]

  Designed by Orville Baker in 1962, the Signetics SE100 Series DTL family was overtaken in 1964 by the better noise immunity and lower cost of Fairchild's 930 Series establishing a competitive industry leap-frog pattern that continues today.

  [...]

  By 1968 lithography advances significantly increased the number of transistors that could be integrated on a chip. Eager to win a share of the TTL business, Fairchild (9300 Series) and Signetics (8200 Series) pioneered the design of TTL-MSI (Medium Scale Integration - up to 100 logic gates per chip) functions such as counters, shift registers, and arithmetic logic units.

  > 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.

  Parent

• Re:The Converto-Braille Re:The Converto-Braille (Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:02AM (1 child)

  by kazzie (5309) on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:02AM (#590922)

  It's odd that he built an electromechanical computer when electronic computers had been in use for 24 years.

  I think the mechanical element was for stamping the braille output.

  Parent

  • Re:The Converto-Braille (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:30AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:30AM (#590940)

    I don't think so. The article says "It took 1,000 relays and more than 100,000 connections before the computer operated properly."

    Parent