Grade 2 Braille | Hacker News Reader

Grade 2 Braille

en.wikipedia.org

35 pointsadmp17 comments

In case you think Braille is old tech from the paper books era, you should check out a modern refreshable Braille display connected to smartphone or laptop. They're feats of engineering that work hand in hand with screen readers to make content readable to blind and low vision people, and others who use them. The screen reader gets its data from the OS and apps and outputs that as either audio announcements, speech, or as Braille for a refreshable display. Single line displays are often 40 to 80 cells wide, each cell a little set of servo-controlled pins that pop up and down to form the Braille characters, but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters and others are multi-line slabs. Braille reading is a super power and more people should learn.

They’re really cool and some people depend on them but working on apps which rely on them has had me thinking about e-waste and cost. Some people have devices which are old but still perfectly functional except that they’re falling out of driver & security support, and many blind people don’t have tons of cash sitting around to replace them. I really hope that the tech industry finds a better model for things like that which are so important to everyday life.

> I really hope that the tech industry finds a better model for things ...

Given the tech industry's failure to support things with 10X, 100X, 1000X, etc. the number of people affected, this seems unlikely.

Instead, could legislation ("when unsupported, it becomes open source", or whatever) be workable? Politicians might not want to be seen voting against blind people. OTOH, the situation is probably 100X more complex than I know of. And legal changes wouldn't magically give anyone the skills and budget and stuff to keep providing support.

Fair, yes, I certainly agree that regulation needs to be a key part of this. In one case I was aware of, simply being able to rebuild an Android image after setting the flag to enable TLS >1.0 would’ve added years to the service life of some expensive hardware.

Agreed. You can get an 2nd hand Orbit Reader for a couple hundred dollars if you search around. There's no substitute for a device which allows you to read the language as it was intended - tactically.

I personally use a Brailliant which has a 40-cell braille display. It's portable so you can load a bunch of BRF books on it and read on the go - and unlike other portable eReaders doesn't suffer from screen glare in the bright sun. :)

> but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters

Worth noting that this is because refreshable braille cells are really expensive to build, not because people necessarily want to be limited to such a short window of text. The Orbit Reader 20 (20 columns) is $800 and that's considered a "low cost" option.

There was a device called "Braille Me" announced some years ago, a 20-cell magnetically based reader which was intended to be a more affordable option, but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

https://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/technology/brailleme.html?from_se...

There's a lot of vaporware in Braille tech where people announce they can sell something for $X and then it either doesn't materialize at all or costs much more on release.

Tangentially related, but I built a Chrome/Firefox extension a while back that converts random words on a webpage as you browse into braille, ASL, Kana, etc.

So if you're ever interested in practicing Grade I Braille in the most functionally useless fashion (by reading it visually) feel free to check it out.

It's also completely open-source.

https://mordenstar.com/projects/glyphshift

https://github.com/scpedicini/glyph-shift

I've encountered grade2 in UK museums and as someone not native and not trained on it, reading the braille is an exercise in cryptography. At least it saves lots of paper.

> English Braille [...] consists of around 250 letters

That is fascinating! I always assumed it had the same number of letters as normal written English.

It looks like "250 letters" would be better described as something like "250 characters." Since it goes on to show patterns for numbers, punctuation, short-hand for some words, common prefixes and suffixes, etc. I wouldn't consider these to be "letters" in the English alphabet.

It is surprising!

Unified English Braille which has replaced the older English Braille American Edition uses a lot of "contractions" ('ea', 'be', etc.), shortform words which are combinations of braille (like the braille for 'ab' which can mean 'about'), and wordsigns ('k' for 'knowledge', etc.) in the Grade II forms.

Grade I Braille is closer to what you thinking of.

It's kind of like when you first start studying American Sign Language and realize that a lot of the grammatical structure comes from French Sign Language.

The reason is that Braille can't really be resized and still be readable, so letter cells are fairly large. A normal letter / A4 sized paper fits maybe 28 columns of text, so Braille is often embossed on legal size paper. And Braille pages don't lay flat against each other, so the books end up being enormous. The paper itself is also thicker because it holds dots better, so the books are quite heavy. This is why so many contractions are used in printing Braille.

Some languages use few or no contractions in Braille, but I think many of them also have very few Braille books available.

Calling them letters is a little misleading. There’s 6 dots per character, which gets you a total of 64 possible characters, including spaces. 250 is probably counting all the multi-character contractions and abbreviations.

These cheat sheets do a really good job of condensing the whole system into one page:

https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/resource/braille-charts-summ...

What are some good resources for learning braille?

There's the UEB Online Course [1]. You can memorize Grade I Braille in a single afternoon, but being able to recognize the raised dots in a small cell takes practice.

You might be able to pick up a few "Easy Reader" books which have larger print that could also help. [2]

[1] https://uebonline.org

[2] https://www.pathstoliteracy.org/resource/dapdots-books-early...

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