As Braille Literacy Declines, Reading Competitions Held to Boost Interest | Hacker News Reader

As Braille Literacy Declines, Reading Competitions Held to Boost Interest

npr.org

While I love and applaud these contests as someone who should be better at reading braille, the article doesn't focus on a few key points. First it's not really the explosion of smartphones that has pushed braille literacy down, so much as it is the concept of having things read to you, in audio or via a screen reader. Laptops are pretty eubiquitous and thus it's much easier to port around a laptop and/or tablet than it is to lug around Braille Books. I remember my home room in grade school and into middle school would have volumes upon volumes of braille books just for individual subjects.

Seems like there should be a market for a dynamic braille surface - something thin and light you could bring with your laptop that plugs into USB and has little dots that can mechanically (or magnetically) raise and lower whenever a pdf or webpage or whatever comes into focus.

I for one get frustrated listening to someone read at their pace and would much rather read at my own pace.

Is there not a market? Here's a list of several dozen devices that MacOS supports: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22491?locale=en_US

A good friend of mine is a blind rehabilitation specialist. We've spent a lot of time discussing tech for the blind. We always run up against the same issues: The market is limited in total numbers, the blind tend to be under-employed or un-employed and therefore have limited $$ for technology widgets, and the market is fragmented.

Those who go blind later in life, like my friend and the Veteran's Hospital clients he works with, tend never to learn braille because there is just too much else of a higher priority in their rehab program and the ROI just isn't there. My aging uncle falls into that category, plus his severe gout in his fingers has pretty much destroyed his sense of touch.

A braille output surface is going to be expensive to build just about any way I can imaging tackling it (please, be more insightful than me and invent a cheap one), and there just aren't going to be a lot of takers.

Braille displays have existed for well over a decade. (A brief look at patents suggests that the idea is half a century old). They usually use piezoelectric effects, according to Wikipedia.

The few blind people I've been acquainted with have all seemed to prefer screenreaders to braille displays. It's not hard to see why. You need to move one hand off the keyboard to read braille (keep in mind that blind users are almost invariably keyboard-centric users). The display is also very low information-density--you get 1 line of maybe 60, 70 characters. The information that gets piped into that display has to be set somehow--and invariably, it comes from screenreader information, which makes it hard to see any value-add benefits to a braille display.

It probably makes more sense to do a full on braille e-reader, particularly since physical braille books have to be much larger than regular books, and e-books already have a smaller problem space to actually implement. Looking around, I'm not the first to have this idea, but most of the products seem to be vaporware, for reasons that aren't clear to me (lack of funding?).

> The few blind people I've been acquainted with have all seemed to prefer screenreaders to braille displays. It's not hard to see why. You need to move one hand off the keyboard to read braille (keep in mind that blind users are almost invariably keyboard-centric users).

Ergonomics/UX factors, as appealing of an explanation as they make, may not be the main reason; the fact that the vast majority of the blind don't read Braille may be a bigger factor (Braille literacy among the blind seems to be about 10% in the US.)

For the people I knew who were blind, lack of knowledge of braille wasn't an issue in their case. After all, one did own (and bring to a conference!) a braille display, he just didn't use it most of the time.

I assume from your comment you haven't watched the movie 'Sneakers'. You should definitely check it out!

While its target release isn't till 2019, this looks promising (speaking from my visually-abled perspective, admittedly): https://dotincorp.com/about/entertainment/

I think a screen reader can be much faster than a dynamic braille surface. A voice running at 1.5x or 2x speed is pretty close to sighted reading speed, and totally intelligible once you get used to it. Plus, voice is hands-free.

https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=braille+reader&tbm=shop

there are quite a lot of them to choose from

can't you end up "reading" faster by using screen readers than with Braille books? Every time I see a video of a blind person with a screen reader the words are so sped up that it makes me think it is a lot more efficient than Braille (not to mention the fact you can get any book read to you that way, not just the few you can find).

I'm fairly ignorant on the subject. Why is Braille important? We replaced sight with touch. Now we replace it with sound. Why's this a bad thing? I see people in the article sounding frustrated but I don't see any compelling reasons for why this is bad. It seems as if it's just the classic old generation wants the new generation to do it their way.

Aside from people who also lack hearing, the main issue is are that you are basically tethered to tech if you want to be able to read/write unless you have an analog tool like braille. Also, if that number drops below a certain amount, you'll have no one who could read what you wrote and braille stops being useful for anyone to learn due to network effects. Since it's an alphabet and not a language, it's not as big a deal if it dies out, but still a loss.

`Why is Braille important?`

what do you do if you're deaf and blind

Maybe it's going the way of Morse Code, where it's use is relegated to labels on things and old books instead of being the only way to roll.

Code is a great way to get status and diagnostics out of peripheral-limited embedded systems.

Is there a need for Braille beyond historical or nostalgic concerns?

Are there better methods that don't require the user to have immediate access to electricity?

Even the real poor ( < $2 per day) generally have access to charging simple electronic devices.

I'd guess those who don't are not likely going to be able to read braille or have access to many books, let alone books in their language in braille.

I don't see electricity access as being the issue.

Well I was thinking of personal experiences and maybe others like to read emergency signs in buildings when power may be out, menus, or read a book outside by the lake. I would not want to rely on electricity to be able to read, it doesn't have to do with poverty.

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