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Comment by samuraiseoul | Hacker News Reader

The real take away here is that only 10% of children who are visually impaired or blind learn braille. Additionally upon looking up that stat cause I figured surely it must be sensationalized, 50% of blind students dropout of school and over 70% are unemployed. A lot of it seems to stem from illiteracy. What a fucking outrage.

Edit: I had the the percentages backwards, 70% are unemployed and 50% drop out, not the other way around as I had written.

Information taken from https://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/documents/pdf/braille_literac...

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Blind person here, though not living in the US. I don't know the exact stats about unemployment here, but, from my observations, they're pretty similar. Most kids do know braille, though. I think that nowadays, braille doesn't help much, as only blind people can use it anyway. Literacy isn't as important for blind people as for the sighted, as they can't use braille to communicate with the rest of society anyway. I generally consider braille not that useful, except in certain narrow contexts. Beware that this is a personal opinion, and braille versus speech is almost as hot in the blind community as static versus dynamic typing with software developers. I don't really use braille daily (except for math drawings, as I'm still in education). I consider technology to be much, much more important now. Computers have probably been the most revolutionary thing when blind people are concerned. Communicating with the sighted, reading books that haven't been specially prepared, access to services etc. Also programming is one of the most accessible jobs out there, as code is just text that can be read aloud by a program, and most tools are CLI-based or have CLI-based alternatives. I think money would be better spend on teaching people on how to use the internet effectively instead of teaching them braille. Braille is a tool whose existence blind people should be aware of, as it may be useful, but it lost its relevance.

When it comes to unemployment, I don't see how braille could help here. Half of the problem is employer bias, actual obstacles that are hard/impossible to overcome or artifical obstacles (inaccessible software) also matter. I think that solving the bias problem would make the situation much better, though. One more problem I see, at least here, is education. Blind people aren't really that aware of what they can realistically do, so they get majors in art, history, literature etc, or think they can get by without good education. No one tells them where to go to have a real chance of finding a job. Sighted people also do it, but, if nothing else works out, they can get a job at Wallmart/Mcdonald's. Blind people don't have that possibility.

As a random observer I always thought that a linear text based OS would be good for blind people, basically what the CLI is but with more metadata, a tree structure so things not of interest could be skipped, eg a long list of filenames. A CLI with folding.

Many years ago, I was looking into emacspeak [1], which seems like it could work for this. (I thought it would be a cool way to interact with a wearable computer; I didn't get much farther than those thoughts)

[1] http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/

Emacspeak is something I always wanted to try, but keep putting it off for later. Emacs is a powerful tool in itself, and the way Emacspeak integrates with it is unprecedented. It's not just a screen reader getting stuff from OS APIs, it knows a lot about internals of most Emacs features so it can make the speech output as efficient as possible. It also has some cool features like sounds in stereo/3d, changing voice parameters for different text styles etc.

Actually GUIs or websites, if done right, can be way better than anything that is text based. They include much more semantic information that a screen reader can use. For example, on websites, we have special shortcut keys to i.e. jump to next heading, table, landmark etc. We can even navigate within tables. This makes using most web/electron/chromium apps pretty easy. Most blind people prefer traditional win32 guis, but I actually don't. Problems arise when semantic information isn't provided, as in a web developer making the text whatever color is fashionable now and adding an onClick instead of using <button>. I don't see how a text-based OS would be different from that.

Can you expand on why you don't prefer traditional Win32 GUIs?

Web UIs can be used with my screen reader's search functionality and quick navigation keys. For example, in Spotify, which uses a web UI, I can do ctrl+ins+f, type rock, press enter and I'm focused on the Rock playlist. Similarly, in Skype, I can search for "audio call" etc. Some elements can also be reached pretty quickly with navigation keys. I think it's much easier to screw up a win32 gui than a web app. The non-web paets of Itunes are a good example. They're accessible, but all objects need to be reached by pressing tab, and there's a lot of objects. There's no semantic structure and no way to provide one. A website-like document would work better in this case.

Were you born blind or did you lose your vision later in life? I was born totally blind and grew up as computers became accessible. While I don’t use braille much now, I don’t understand how someone born blind can have basic literacy using only speech. Growing up reading books allowed me to understand basic sentence structure, spelling, etc. These are all important as a programmer considering a large part of the job is communicating your decisions and opinions. I also found braille to be very useful in math. I think that braille is critical for early education if you are blind. It’s less important if you lose your vision later in life and already are literate do to reading print growing up.

I was born blind. I have read only a single book in Braille in my life, though I used it at school for notetaking. I switched to using the computer in last year of secondary (age of 15). I wanted to do so before, but I was in a very backwards special school for the blind. For math, I have been using LaTeX, which, coupled with some speech dictionary hacks in my screen reader, works pretty great. Braille is still useful when drawings are concerned, but only if you have the right books, which is not always the case. Most book reading was either done by my parents (before the age of ten) or by audiobooks afterwards. I don't have that many spelling problems, and those I do have are usually detected by Word, which is what I use when I really do care. I think the warning beep that my screen reader plays when typing a misspelled word is actually a much better learning tool than any form of reading.

I’m not blind but very visually-impaired and couldn’t agree with you more about computers. The iPad and eBooks have been an absolute godsend for me — I still remember the old days of getting unwieldy enlarged physical books. Now it’s so much nicer!!

When growing up I had to prepare for the possibility that I’d go totally blind one day (thankfully that did not happen). One of the best things that was ever done for me was getting regular touch-typing lessons from a young age.

On screen readers - I’m really excited to see what ML could bring to the table here. I think accessibility could be increased greatly with an ML that could recognise what was happening on the screen based only on the contents of say, the last few seconds of frame buffer data.

I’m also really excited for what AR (augmented with audio in particular) glasses and the like could do here too.

One of my blind friends told me there's some evidence that since braille is a form of literacy, people who were blind from birth and never learned braille also never developed some critical brain functions, so they're seriously limited in what kinds of jobs they can do. So if that's true, then even if you don't use braille much, learning it still helped you.

As for me, I'm partially sighted, so I learned to read print; I just need it larger and/or need to get up close to read it. So I can't contribute any first-hand knowledge or opinions on this topic.

I tried learning Braille. It’s incredibly difficult, and I’ve only had a handful of times in 10 years where it would have been helpful. In my opinion, screen readers are king. Also, Audible is amazing!

My last job search was very enlightening. Coding tests, phone interviews all went great at several places. Step into an in person interview with a white cane though and everything changes.

I understand it can make people uncomfortable, especially if I’m the first blind person someone interacts with. But, that doesn’t make it any less illegal to pass on me over someone else all else being equal.

I think most hiring managers just aren’t aware of the bias they might bring in to the equation when they encounter a disability for the first few times. Incredibly frustrating though.

The blind people that I know absolutely excel at what they do. One is a software engineer that is so focused it makes me feel scatterbrained, the other easily the best piano tuner that I've ever met.

Deafblind person here. Braille isn't a nice to have for me. It's a must-have. We Deafblind are certainly a rare species , and unfortunately, usually forgotten. I learned Braille "later" in life when my sight nosedived at age 27. Best decision I've ever made.

A few thoughts about the low Braille literacy levels. First of all, most visually impaired children are not completely blind, and this is especially true with progressive eye conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa (which I have as part of Usher syndrome, which presents with hearing and viision losses). Magnification and color technology has enabled people who can't read 12-point fonts to read now. For instance, I'm close to completely blind in one eye, and have somethign like 20/300 in the other ... and I can use built-in features to zoom in/invert colors to read visually. So, "visually impaired" =/= completely blind.

Also, you must use Braille every day to develop neural pathways to process it quickly. It only took me 2 weeks to learn the code. It took me much, much longer to internalize it--to the point when I can jsut put my fingers on it and get it. For people who can still see, especially if they see enough to benefit handsomely form magnification technology, it's hard to feel motivated.

There are a lot of other issues that I won't get into. But what I can say is that blind people can get away without learnign Braille, sure, but they won't be able to excel at certain things.

For instance, Braille is still the only thing that gives blind people a spatial appreciation for language. Language is more than words. It comes in paragraphs, has puncuation, et cetera. If a blind person wnats to truly master their language, they must learn Braille. They can get buy without it, sure, but ... they won't excel at it.

On the pratical side, you need to know braille to label things. This is why I advocate for at least a functional knowledge of Braille. If you have a labeler, you can label wine bottles and cans that feel identical. This is where audio-only approach fails.

There's a lot more I could say on the topic, but I'll stop here. Just putting this out there: I wish people would stop sayign that text-to-speech technology has obviated Braille. There are Deafblind people out ther, too, and Braille will always have a place for those who want to excel at writing and reading.

This may be a stupid question, but how do you read from the computer as a deafblind person? Is there some sort of device that converts the text to braille?

Refreshable braille displays, maybe?

(not blind but found out about these and they seem pretty cool)

Not a stupid question at all. I use an assortment of accessibility tools. I can still read visually thanks to my absurdly large screen and equally absurdly large text in inverted colors. I can also hear (low-resolution sound quality) through a cochlear implant, so i use VoiceOver to navigate. To read more long-form text such as books, articles, etc. I use a refreshable Braille display.

Basically, I use a bit of everything because no one accessibility tool meets all of my needs. Better than nothing, I guess.

I should clarify something about deafblindness. Very, very rarely is a deafblind person totally deaf and blind. Usually they have some residual hearing or sight, and I fall into that camp.

Hope that answers your question!

Thanks for the reply. I've learned something today. I have an almost completely blind friend who mainly relies on audio and braille so I wondered how that carried over.

Almost everyone who is legally blind is partially sighted. The two legally blind people I know both tell me those were most screwed over were the ones who learned to read braille in school instead of printed text. In this world, it's invaluable to simply be able to pull a sheet of paper up right up to a thick lens over your eye and slowly read it. If you only know Braille, you're helpless to solve this predicament, and Braille documents are extremely rare.

For digital media, screen readers are an enormous accessibility feature, but having (impaired) vision and knowledge of english is a helpful fallback for the plethora of poorly built sites and applications that have, say, text in an image. Braille is not helpful in a world of flat screens.

Often blindness is one of many disabilities a child may have. If a child is severely impaired basic skills such as the ability to dress and feed them selves are a lot more important then the ability to read braille. I’d like to see these statistics broken down in a way that considers individuals with multiple disabilities.

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