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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

I worked with a totally blind developer at a top tier tech company. He used a braille terminal. It was really interesting to watch him work.

There’s no denying blind persons face unique challenges, but I’ve been seriously impressed with the fortitude and adaptability I’ve seen them display.

As an aside I wish more developers would think about accessibility. It helps everyone. I highly recommend participating in dining in the dark or a similar program to learn real sympathy for the challenges blind persons face and to see how capable they are of overcoming them.

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I've tried using a screen reader and the best way I can describe it is that it is like using a computer through a telephone menu. You hear things described to you at a pretty quick pace and you need to mentally build a model of what you are doing. I would routinely lose mental focus of where I "was" and would be completely lost.

I'm sure this isn't as difficult for people who use these tools day-in and day-out. But it was an eye opening experience for sure.

One of my computer science professors was old enough to remember his undergraduate on punchcards, running stacks on shared mainframes at night.

In his words, "You got really good at checking your code, because if you made a mistake, you had to wait until the next evening for another time slot."

It stuck with me because it boggled my (privileged) mind how adaptable people and their brains are to just about any scenario you can dream up.

Even just thinking of how much sighted developers benefit from adding a second or third display to our setup— what is the benefit of added desktop area? Additional context, of course, being able to have lots of things on the go at once! And then you unplug from your dock and all those windows you had spread out are now crushed together on the single laptop screen.

It boggles my mind imagining the discipline that would be required to maintain all this state purely in one's mind.

The juxtaposition of phrases like "eye opening experience" to this subject matter make me realize how many sighted metaphors we use as a matter of course. I don't know whether or not that matters, but they certainly jump out at you in this context (another metaphor...)

Metaphors are not just prevalent in how we speak, they are central to how we think.

The book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By is a seminal work on this.

As an aside, while I can’t speak for the community as a whole, all of the blind persons that I’m personally acquainted with don’t mind visual metaphors so in my case at least I don’t worry that I’m giving offense. I agree it is striking though how easily we use visual metaphors.

Almost every sentence you can produce will contain some kind of metaphor, or metaphorical use of an originally concrete word. And since vision is one of the most salient senses for almost everyone, it's not surprising.

Braille hardware seems pretty expensive for what you get. Last time I looked most of the devices costed $800+ USD for a single row of 24 letters.

Many (most?) states offer grants to help pay for adaptive hardware. And I’m completely certain any company worth working for will spring for it too.

I’m a sighted person and I’m not going to pretend I know what the right technology for any particular blind person is, but computer braille really is fascinating.

Edit: I’m not a hardware guy, but it feels like an 80x24 or larger computer braille display is well within the capabilities of today’s hardware hackers. Imagine a reverse mechanical keyswitch with 8 dots that can be put on a PCB of arbitrary size in whatever configuration to understand what I have in mind. There’s probably not much money to be made, but someone with a passion and existing financial success could really make a difference.

Speaking as someone who was born blind Braille may not be worth using if you went blind later in life. I was forced to use it heavily until about 10 or 11 in spite of the fact that I wanted to use text to speech since it's quicker. It was totally worth it since it gave me a basic literacy foundation that enables me to type out sentences like these and be able to spell well enough that less then 1/5 of everything I type has to be corrected with Spellcheck. I have an 18-year-old braille display I got in school when I started programming more. It still works but I only use it once a month if that. I do everything with text to speech. The only time it was really useful was when I was doing assembly programming and had to look at hex values in a debugger. If you go blind later in life it may be pretty easy to avoid learning anything but enough braille to read signs for room numbers and bathrooms and do just fine.

Wouldn't a large braille display be very useful for getting an overview of something? When consuming a big chunk of material, audio is very convenient, but being "linear" seems to make it quite impractical when you need to jump back and forth, or get an overview.

I'm particularly bad at piecing together a larger context from smaller pieces, so maybe it's easier for others, especially if they are forced to?

Large Braille displays basically don't exist, they'd be too expensive.

Navigation with a screen reader isn't just next item / previous item, though. There are hotkeys to jump between headings, links and so on. That's why good markup is so important for accessibility.

No sure, I didn't mean that navigation itself was hard, more that it's hard to know where to navigate to. If you can see, you can quickly scan a page and get some sort of understanding of what is where, but at least with audio that's very hard.

It seems that it should be possible to make cheap full screen braille displays, I suppose it's just that the volumes are not big enough to drive down prices.

The issue is that to move 80x24 dots independently you need 80*24 physical actuators (or an enormous mechanical multiplexer), which is very expensive. Industrial looms and knitting machines have that but nothing much else does. However, the technology to solve computer braille without needing width*height mechanical actuators actually exists - the fluidistor, or liquid transistor - but is only just now getting serious development, and it's mostly in haptic feedback labs.

If you want 8024 characters, you actually need at least 8024*6 dots, each Braille character, also called a cell when Braille displays are concerned, can consist of up to six dots, eight in computer Braille.

In my experience, anyone with any kind of physics background thinks that Braille displays could be radically cheaper.

Anyone who spends a couple hours on researching the problem thinks that the price could be improved, maybe by half, but that the problem isn't as easy as it seems.

Anyone who tries building one eventually arrives at the conclusion that making it cheaper requires a bunch of tradeoffs which they're not willing to make.

As far as I know, the central problem off Braille Display engineering isn't making the dots, but putting them so close to each other. If the gap between dots would be half an inch, let's say, a braille display would probably be a hundred-dollar affair. It would be completely unusable for any kind of reading, though.

Orbit Research managed to find a way to make Braille displays somewhat cheaper, which is now incorporated into the Orbit Reader 20 and 40, but that technology has a much slower refresh rate than traditional Braille displays and causes them to be much louder.

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