Hacker News Reader

Comment by clavoie | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com