Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving | Hacker News Reader

Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving

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Anyone has any recommendations for a cheap braille display and can explain quick quick how it integrates in a programmer's workflow? I'm an EMACS user, I've seen a bunch of packages that integrate with BRLTTY, but I'm curious what's the day-to-day.

I'm not blind, so this shouldn't be something that'll take away from someone with a real need; this is just one nerd's attempt at learning another (practically speaking, useless to me) skill for the sake of learning. I've already glued braille stickers on my normal keyboard, but they don't last, on that side I'm already considering DIY keys, maybe from a 3d printing shop online.

I've looked at a few online and the prices are in the range where I can't justify it just a fun learning experience, so I'm considering a DIY approach, but that seems equally if not more fraught with difficulties. Thoughts?

The Orbit Reader is as cheap as you'll probably get.

You can also look on Ebay. In Germany, you can find a relatively cheap one on a regular basis.

For example, at the moment you can get one for less than 500€: https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-braillezeile/k0

I bought a couple of them and sent them to a friend in France who is himself blind and active in an association to help people with learning braille. Interestingly, France has not that many second-hand braille tablets. I suppose that it is because in Germany you can get them paid by the health insurance, this makes it easier for people to get access to them.

Seems like I went down a similar path. Emacs user, brltty, digital display, the shebang, but not necessarily together :-)

Maybe my experience will be useful to you. Do it for the plasticity.

a high level writeup is here: https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/learning%20braille....

can talk separately in more detail, although for my purposes the code parts are pretty minimal. Brltty does a good job, and so did eBay for me when I started.

There are two parts to learning braille: learning to feel the patterns and learning how text is encoded.

For computers, there’s a third step: learning how your screen reader works.

The first is hard on its own, and may be effectively unachievable for elderly persons (the sensitivity of your fingers goes down with age)

The second and third you can exercise without hardware with some (¿most?) screen readers. For example, Apples voiceover has a braille panel (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/voiceover/vo15603/mac)

Enable that and cover the rest of the screen to force yourself to not cheat by looking at the screen, and you’ve a cheap testing setup.

Braille is an amazing invention. As a sighted person, my fingers can't differentiate the patterns at all but of course that would come with practice. I worked with a guy once who used a Braille terminal and he was just as fast as anyone else. One thing I always wondered with Braille signage and the like - how do you know it is there to touch it? Is there some convention for placement?

Many blind people have enough residual vision to locate the label, but they can't read text for example.

In Germany, the packaging for medicine features Braille that's hard to miss.

Apart from that, I'm sure there are standards and building codes and such that regulate this.

More than 90% of blind people can see the sun. In the us blind means you vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200, without glasses my vision is worse than that, so if I can do it without glasses some blind can as well. (Of course my vision is correctable to perfection)

Interesting, I only ever imagined blindness to be total darkness and absence of sight. One great example among many of how you can't effectively design accommodations for a particular disability without getting input from someone who has that disability.

Fun fact! Unless you have no eyes or no optic nerve, you'll basically always see something. Even 100% blind people can still see shadows, movement, the sun, etc.

Most of the "blind" definition is around driving and reading.

I'm blind with only light perception, but I cannot see movement or shadows. Another fun fact I guess.

Other blind people see a flashing shifting colorful mess in their field of vision. I know someone who can even mentally control the perception of the visual disruption to an extent, like making it flash different colors.

The visual system from the eye to the brain and everything between is incredibly complex and can fail in all kinds of different ways.

The Guide to ADA Standards provides some info:

> The required location of tactile signs is relatively uniform (i.e., beside or, where permitted, on doors) to make them easier to locate without vision. The height is limited to a specific range (48 inches – 60 inches) to facilitate reading by touch.

So a blind person touches a door frame, and gets a cue to feel for a sign.

https://www.access-board.gov/ada/guides/chapter-7-signs/

I love that more operating systems, like Android, are beginning, as of like last year or so, to take Braille seriously. In the US, the National Library service for the blind (and print disabled) are rolling out a service where Braille readers get a free Braille display, a device which connects to a screen reader on a device to offer Braille input and output. The Braille display they're giving out can also download and display books from their service. The display I got, one by a company called Humanware, uses the Braille HID protocol, which Apple readily accepted and implemented, along with NVDA, and I think BRLTTY. NVDA is a screen reader on Windows, and BRLTTY is a cross platform but mostly Linux screen reader that mainly works with Braille instead of speech.

So, The NLS EReader as they're called works pretty well with the iPhone and Mac, NVDA, JAWS, BRLTTY, and the Chromebook. But it wasn't until a few weeks ago, when the TalkBack folks released their six-month-update, did TalkBack even support the NLS EReader... over USB. Apparently, the Bluetooth stack has to be substantially changed to allow Braille HID over Bluetooth. So yeah, Apple has the advantage of supporting this thing for a few years, although there are definitely bugs. Hopefully, as these devices become much more prominent in the US, screen readers will try to grab onto the fact that many more people have Braille.

Slightly related 12 days ago:

TMAP – On Demand Tactile Street Map https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901794

Only four comments including a link to https://www.instructables.com/OpenBraille-a-DIY-Braille-Embo... and PixBlaster

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project.

i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it?

of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.

you need fast refresh speed with pins which are steady under pressure while reading. Also, it should be packed so that you can have 6/8 pins to form a braille cell. the rest is a breeze.

personally, I think that braille is just not worth it for normal reading, but you can't do any stem without it because math is not linear like normal text and tts just sucks.

I met a blind person studying computer science. I asked him why he used a speech synthesiser instead of a Braille display and he replied that he'd love to have a Braille display but they are far too expensive for a mere student.

(The sounds that emerged from his speech synthesiser didn't much resemble human speech but he was used to it and it was obviously quite a lot faster than normal human speech.)

The speed is something that one gets used to.

I just learned that several mathematical notations exist for Braille:

https://chezdom.net/mathematicalbraillecodes/

Have you looked at existing braille "displays"? There's a few models out there.

They already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refreshable_braille_display

of course i know. the main point of my previous comment is building one as a side project.

Its been on my back burner for a decade. I think we can do a lot better than the ones on the market. I wrote up an idea I had for it (permissive license, I just want the thing to exist)

https://koubaa.github.io/refreshable-braille-display.html

Braille displays are pretty common, but awfully expensive. If your side project ends up costing less than $1000, you're on a good track. Most of them are in the $2000-$7000 range, with the exception of Orbit Reader 20 which is only $800 (although many online shops seem to be permanently out of stock, I don't know if it's really sold at that price).

I had a blind classmate back in high school (starting ~2008) who used a laptop and a single-line braille display, and wow I did not know her equipment was that expensive! It just seemed like a reasonably straight-forward piece of hardware to me.

There isn't enough demand to scale it. If everyone in the world would buy a brail display they could make them for cheap, but only a few buy them, and those buyers need to support all the costs of setting up manufacturing.

I'm sighted, but bought a used braille display for slightly less than $200 to learn braille for fun. It's pretty impressive to actuate hundreds of tiny dots at a time, for every sentence you need to read. Every once in a while one dot doesn't drop back when the display is refreshed, and since you're swiping your fingers across the display, feeling (or maybe I was seeing?) that one oddly placed dot is disorienting.

Maybe that feeling goes away with fluency, which I can't speak to, but I have a lot of respect for the engineering that goes into these displays. Granted, I'm not a hardware person.

I will preface this by saying that i never built anything related to this, nor am i visually-impaired so take whatever i say with a grain of salt. However i have been interested in the subject on & off for quite sometime following some hype around Braille tablets a decade ago. (which sadly never materialized)

> 30 units of display thingy

They are usually called "Braille Cells" (sometimes called "piezoelectric braille cell") and have 8 dots (instead of the usual 6 for books) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Braille_Code] These cells are comprised of 8 levers. The "Dot" rises when a voltage is applied to a crystal that expands due to the piezo effect/bimorph.

Here is a video of someone taking apart a couple of them and showing the insides, driver etc.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmwFsTLkpa8 (it's not an in-depth look but just to get an idea)

You can read about how it works in more details here : https://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/9307/InTech-Analysis_and_des...

Okay now what? Well you could acquire some from ebay like this one i guess https://www.ebay.com/itm/255908240759?hash=item3b9551dd77

Or try to find something from Metec, i have seen their P20 as well as the B11 Module used with arduino projects several times, here is the website https://metec-ag.de/en/produkte-braille-module.php

They also sell "Braille Lines" which are combos : cells + backpanel/driver : https://metec-ag.de/en/produkte-braille-zeilen.php (If you find a way to buy them i would greatly appreciate you sharing it)

PS : These cells use 200V DC to work so your project will need a DC-DC converter. You can search for similar speccs to the official one on aliexpress or whatever https://metec-ag.de/downloads/dcdc-converter-5to200v.pdf

Finally you would need a brain for all this which could be the raspi directly or you might opt for using the raspberry-pi (for the ebook manipulation, character-to-dot conversion etc.. unless you decide to pre-format the files) in conjunction with an arduino (for the signal transfer/propagation.. you know sending the dot configuration)

Take a look here for some software inspiration (it also explains the signals the braille module would be expecting but you are better off looking at the Datasheet for anything serious): https://github.com/bertrandmartel/metec-braille-driver#more-...

Good luck.

---- Some more resources :

A nice video from "Applied Science" about a one Cell driver DIY project (He is i believe, using the P16 cell from metec) might help you decide whether to buy a backplane-driver or make your own [also the idea of putting a push-button underneath the braille-cell might be interesting to you for a selection mechanism maybe?] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss-Fux86doQ

A video showing Metic P20 cells + backpanel + DC step-up converter driven by an Arduino Uno (it has no value other than to hopefully encourage you to pursue this project :D ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zqth08wQBs

Designing Braille System using P20 Braille Cells Presentation (a student project i think with a good overview of the minimum necessary parts and their functions you can skip to the 5min mark to avoid the usual academia-fluff) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAYB0g6LhVM

Braille tablets/multiline braille displays are finally coming. The traditional piezo-electric cells are not well suited for them, due to the space the cell + driver+ electronics need. Putting the four rows of pins in a cell does already require staggering the elements. If you disassemble a cell, you'll see that every row has another pin length the bottom row usually has the longest and the top row the shortest pins. So this is not very scalable for multiple lines of dots.

There are two commercially produced techniques for multiline braille displays now: the first comes from Dot (a Korean company) who makes the Dotpad, this technique is also used in the Humanware/APH Monarch which will be an Android based standalone braille tablet. The other technique is created by Orbit Braille and they have their Graphity braille tablet. I couldn't find any good technical documentation that describe how these methods work exactly, so if anyone has any pointers I would like to read more about it.

Why do people want braille displays? Sound is a faster, denser, and cheaper information exchange medium and our brains are pattern matching machines. I can easily imagine a screen output -> earphones technology that can provide the use of a screen.

Wait, why confine this to screens? There was a deaf guy in Popular Science years ago who wired the output of a microphone to his visual cortex. He was able to see the sounds, not interfering with his normal vision. Why is there no such product to wire a camera to the brain to enable vision in the blind?

it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project.

This already fell off the front page but I am actually working on exactly that project right now. The inspiration was standing around with my kid, seeing some braille and decoding it.

The cost of the current systems is associated with the volume of hard tooling and assembly work necessary to create the precision lever assemblies based on 1970s piezo technology.

Therefore, the initial R&D goal is to determine whether it may now be possible to achieve similar outcomes using alternate approaches to the actuation problem. Many people have tried but it seems all have failed to achieve the necessary combination of alternate actuation, spatial density and manufacturability within a low cost design goal.

The braille in the picture at the top is sideways.

Someone was talking about placement of Braille on signs- there is a standard, but I find the Braille is wrong about 30% of the time.

https://legobraillebricks.com/ exists and is cool.

Braille Is Alive, Well, and Ever-Evolving, yet still can't see.

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