I am braille-geek, hear me wibble

Fri, 7 Feb 2003

I'm still learning braille. It's kind of weird, because it took 2-3 weeks to learn the alphabet and punctuation, but 4 months later we're still learning contractions! Luckily I think we've only got one more lesson on contractions, and then we can move on to something else. I won't bore you with an exposition on braille, but I do want to show you a choice sample from my homework:

simulated braille example

In print, that reads like this:

  11. One of the outstanding characters in the play is a
typical man of the world who reads braille.

Am I the only one who thinks that's a tremendous oxymoron: typical and reads braille?

Braille is cool, and it's not actually very hard, but I think it is making me dyslexic, since it's so easy to mistake one sign for its mirror image when reading. (I read braille visually, not by touch, especially since these days we're brailling on the computer and printing out simulated braille rather than the raised stuff that blind people can actually read.) I think I'm getting pretty good at producing braille though, and when I know the rules well and have gotten in some practice, I intend to try for transcriber certification.

Yesterday I took a rough draft of my homework on the bus to proofread, and finally someone asked what it was! I've been doing this for ages and have been continually surprised that no one was curious enough to say anything. I guess people are just so accustomed to avoiding contact with other people in public places. And this time I was surprised at myself, because I didn't know how much to explain to her. I just said it was braille, which seemed kind of unresponsive to me, but there wasn't much more to say without getting into geekery.

And now I must finish proofreading my braille before tomorrow morning.

Comments

bunny says:

I think that's really cool that you're learning braille, although if I were on a bus, I don't know if I'd say anything, either (as it might be obvious that you're learning it). I've seen people with braille computers on the Metro and people speed-reading braille, but they've all been blind.

Of course, I think braille is neat looking as well as really useful, and it reminds me about an idea I had for an exhibit web page (it's about communication). :)

By the way, did you know your preview button isn't working correctly?

Laurabelle says:

Ohh, the button is working perfectly, it's my template that was screwed. Thanks for telling me, and I've fixed it now.

And maybe you're right, and everyone knows it's braille so they don't need to ask. The woman who asked said that she was curious about what it was, and I don't think she recognized it as simulated braille.

Dany says:

I'm also trying to learn braille, for a school program on accessibility. It is not too difficult, at least for integral Braille. Grade 2 Braille is much more complex but I am not sure it is worth the trouble since there are some computer software to do the work.

I found a free online translator to transcribe from black to braille, but I am still looking for something to do the reverse (braille to black).

Laurabelle says:

Dany, it's great that you're learning braille. I would highly encourage you to put out the effort to learn Grade 2, because it's not really that hard (even though it does take some time) and because a computer translator just isn't as good as a human transcriber.

For transcribing, my braille agency uses software called Braille2000. It's pretty good, and it can also translate from print to braille. However, it makes lots of mistakes, and there are ways in which computers simply are not capable of creating correct braille.

For example, in Braille there's a sign for a period/full stop (dots 256), and there's a different sign for an ellipsis (dot 3 repeated in 3 cells). So what happens when there are four dots in print? That depends on the syntax of the preceding sentence. If the sentence was complete and there's nothing obviously missing, the period goes first (ex: "I used to have a cat...."). Otherwise the ellipsis goes first, inside the sentence (ex: "I used to..."). How do you expect a computer to understand that?

There are lots of examples like that. Word division is probably the most common one, although it might be solveable. The problem is, language is designed for parsing by humans, not computers. We don't know how we understand language, so it's very difficult to build a computer program that can do even a halfway decent job of it.

Libbraille looks really cool, especially from an open-source perspective. Thanks for mentioning it. I did notice that their translator doesn't even offer American Grade 2 as an option, probably because it seems to be an EU-based project. I shall have to see whether I can lend a hand.

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