Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

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Blindness is unfortunately a nearly crushing disability economically. 74% of the blind are unemployed [1] (there is another figure you will occasionally also see of 13% unemployment for the blind, that's a US Government statistic that excludes anyone who is not considered in the list of potentially employed people).

Equally important for HN-type readers to know is that Braille literacy is highly correlated with employment among the blind, and rates of Braille literacy are falling rapidly in the US, from a peak of around 50% in the 1950's to more like 12% today [1].

Smart phone apps are great and important but from what I've read they don't seem to be having the impact on blind employment that Braille has had.

Hopefully someone here will know of a survey reporting measurable economic gains for the new generation of Braille-illiterate technologically assisted blind, thus far what I've heard anecdotally on that front has not been encouraging.

[1] http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/braille/needforbraille.html

The tools around Braille are expensive. Braille computer displays and typewriters are all in the thousands of dollars. Books are in the hundreds of dollars, and hard to obtain.

Screen readers, the computer replacement for Braille, are also stupidly expensive (one I looked up was $900 for the home edition).

I'm not blind, but my father had low vision and so I know a little about the experience. It infuriates me that authors have pressured Amazon into removing the audio text reading ability of the Kindle. Such small-minded greed is indefensible.

Most books exist as audio books.

You mean "a very small subset of all books exist in the more expensive form of an audio book". Just check the library closest to you: 10000s of books, 100s of audio books.

Wow, I would not have expected those low Braille literacy figures. For the UK, numbers seem to be similar. I couldn't find any for other European countries, but at least here in Germany Braille markings are very common, so I'd always thought that most blind can use them.

I think computers killed off Braille, particularly among the young. Both Windows (with the right software) and Mac OS X (straight out of the box) are surprisingly (it suprised me!) usable by blind people.

With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

> With speech output instead of Braille devices? Interesting.

Both. The one doesn't exclude the other. I'm a heavy user of text-to-speech at high rates to digest content easily, but prefer braille when coding or doing some work on a shell/terminal.

You'll see much more braille displays in some European countries because they get subsidized by health insurance or a government entity that provides assistive technology for the workplace. This workstation has a 88 cell braille display, which means it can display 88 braille characters at a time. That unit costs $10k or so, depending on market and EUR/USD rate etc, but to give you an idea of the price tag. I also have a mobile unit with 40 cells, I guess that one is about $6k or so.

The 12% figure refers to legally blind children, the majority (90%) of whom are partially sighted.

For someone who is able to read text at close distances with significant optical assistance, it is far more beneficial for them to learn a written language than to learn braille characters. Until recently, many legally blind US children (and their parents) had the choice to either learn braille or written English. Those who learned braille ended up severely disadvantaged because of the utter lack of braille information produced in our society, and the difficulty of using any screen-based technology.

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