Scanning a Braille Playboy Magazine (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Scanning a Braille Playboy Magazine (2011)

blog.archive.org

37 pointsbrudgers13 comments

I used to volunteer with an organization in Philadelphia for the blind and vision impaired. I read Playboy articles to a blind co-worker who entered it as Braille into a computer program. They had a press as well, to produce Braille documents and mail them to individuals and libraries. It was an interesting experience. An older woman would take a black sharpie and scribble over all the "interesting" photos before giving the Playboy issue to me to read.

I became interested in Braille Kobographs ( http://www.dotlessbraille.org/kobographs.htm ) and did some experiments with turning it into a font ( https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/365490/braille_ko... ).

Concept of 2D scanning an essentially 3D artifact tangentially brought to mind the problem of tens of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that are waiting to be deciphered. One good way to do this would be to 3D scan them and share the scans among academic institutions but for some reason this is not done at scale, e.g. see this recent post: http://persiababylonia.org/2018/07/31/3d-scanning-clay-table.... Cost is an issue but my guess it's not the only one.

Building a cheap hand scanner by using a cheap 3D sensor, e.g. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3316 is perennially on my project todo list. Anybody else finds this interesting?

For clay tablets 3D scanning is too imprecise and too expensive (in terms of labor, equipment and time).

RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) [1,2] is a much better alternative to these "flattish" artifacts. All you need is a decent camera, a flashlight and a small piece of freely available software.

The result is an extremely high-res 2.5D scan of the surface of the object. Here is a (thumbnail-sized) example of an RTI'd Greek wax seal: http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/RTIgif_x... (from [3,4]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_texture_mapping [2] http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/index.ht... [3] http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/2019/04/26/rti-dome-am-cceh-erster-... [4] http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/RTIBlogpostFiles/web-image/

That's ingenious. One of the "obvious when you think about it" solutions.

This immediately makes me think of the movie Sneakers https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/9c0aya/in_sne...

From the top comment:

"And before someone asks, no they don’t have tactile pictures! I called the local library for the blind around the age boys want to know that sort of thing and asked. They hung up"

As a blind/braille user myself, I'm curious as to what they replace them with. Some publishers just omit pictures, while some try to describe them, particularly when they're significant, not just for decorational purposes only.

Somewhat fatuous question, are the pix in Playboy considered significant given that that's what the mag is known for?

Actual serious question to miki123211, if it were technically possible to do so, perhaps by contoured impressions, couldn't pictures be reproduced as to an extent useful to those who only touch? Could a tree be reproduced to show the root knot, the trunk growing out of it, and the division into branches? If close up the outline of leaves and the veins within? Either with smooth curves or dots much smaller than braille.

Having written that I can appreciate the technical challenges, but in theory...? And if possible, would it be useful and appreciated by braille users?

When I was helping to translate Playboy articles into Braille (around 2010) I only ever translated articles that generally had nothing to do with sex. The articles are not too much different than you would find in a normal mag. I don’t think they were trying to translate the porn part. They have limited resources so they have to make value decisions on where to spend their effort.

no, not in that detail. A general outline of a tree (to represent tree-like relationships) would work, though I don't think a picture would be useful in that situation. For school, geometry and so on, touchable pictures exist and are useful, though. That's one of the few areas where a graphical representation surpasses a textual description.

So, when they say "I only read it for the articles", they really do mean it :)

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230988

From the old comment thread:

> I'm curious if there are any methods they could use to scan and translate the typed Braille into written English, or language in which it is written.

Liblouis [1] can translate in both directions.

[1]: http://liblouis.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com