Building Braille: The History of Braille, and Where Design is Taking it Next
My friend and accessibility maestro Jennifer Sutton brought this article from Print Magazine to my attention yesterday, and it seemed like a fitting epilogue to my Braille Toolbox series (which starts here). People are doing more innovative and creative things with Braille than I knew or imagined!
Well, we’ve reached the end of my small Braille toolbox (see Parts One, Two, and Three of this series, if you haven’t already), but the fun isn’t over! I still anticipate needing a few other Braille gadgets, and the inventions and innovations that are popping up everywhere in the Braille world make the future look very exciting.
The next item down my Braille wishlist is an embosser—basically the Braille version of a regular printer.
This connects to a computer and embosses any text file in hard-copy Braille. It cuts down the time involved in making Braille, since you can type and edit on the computer with a QWERTY keyboard, make multiple copies, etc. Since my work involves a lot of comparing texts side-by-side, being able to print them out instead of switching back and forth on a Braille display will be a huge time-saver.
There are a couple of variables to consider when choosing a Braille embosser. Some only emboss on one side of the paper; others emboss both sides, staggering the lines of dots so they don’t interfere with one another. Some only do Braille text, while others specialize in tactile graphics, and some do both.
These machines tend to be expensive—from $2000 to about $7000 for personal embossers (industrial embossers can run $50,000 or more), so knowing what you want is critical.I’m very interested in trying to use tactile graphics to represent cuneiform texts, so that I can still read them in the original sign system, rather than relying on transliteration. I also anticipate a high volume of embossing, so double-sided would be very nice.
My current dream machine is the Juliet 120, from Humanware. It quickly embosses double-sided Braille and comes with tactile graphics software. Do you have a Braille embosser you love and think I should consider? Tell me about it in the comments!
Like everything in tech right now, there’s a lot of innovation happening in accessibility. For Braille displays, it looks like devices are going to get better, more diverse, and much cheaper in coming years.
Humanware has created a Braille display/tablet hybrid, the BrailleNote Touch, which has a Braille display and traditional keyboard, as well as a touch screen interface that runs on Android.
A number of companies now produce multiline Braille displays, including Canute from Bristol Braille Technologies and the TACTIS100 from Tactisplay Corp.
These two are primarily for desktop use, but the race is on to produce the first Braille tablet/ebook—a standalone, full-page Braille display that is light and durable enough to be truly portable.
The first one to market will probably be BLITAB. This tablet is being developed by an international team in Austria, and it’s being intentionally designed for a worldwide user base, so it should handle multiple languages easily. The pins are raised and lowered by smart materials instead of mechanical actuators, which increases its durability and decreases its complexity and weight. It looks like BLITAB is now available for preorder, and will ship later this year!
Another company working on Braille tablets is Dot, which is already getting quite a bit of good press for their Braille smartwatch, the Dot Watch, which displays not only the time, but text messages and alerts from your phone. Once the Dot Watch ships (starting April 1), they will shift their R&D energy to developing two Braille tablets, the Dot Mini and the Dot Tab.
There are rumors of other technologies in development, too, like rotary Braille displays that have the cells set on the edge of a rotating disc. This way, you could read continuously without even having to move your finger.
I’m glad I chose to invest in a mature technology this time, because most of the next-generation Braille tech will need a few years to iron the kinks out, but I’m very excited about the amount of innovation and improvement that is happening.
(This is Part Three of a Series. Here’s Part One and Part Two)
Ok, we’re skipping a few historical developments here, but this is my beautiful new Braille display, the VarioUltra 20, by BAUM.
The current generation of Braille displays like the VarioUltra combine the functionality of two earlier pieces of technology, the Braille notetaker and the refreshable braille display. They can function as either independent PDAs or as displays for a phone or computer.
The display portion is a single line containing, in this case, 20 Braille cells. There is also a VarioUltra 40, with 40 cells, and other displays range from 14 to 80 cells in length.
These things are truly mechanical marvels. The tiny nylon pins that make the Braille dots are only spaced 2.2 mm apart, and they must all be able to raise and lower independently. Each of the 160 dots on this display is connected to its own lever, which is raised up and down by a crystal that expands under electrical current and contracts when it is removed. They refresh in a fraction of a second—much less than the time that it takes to move your finger from the end of the line back to the beginning. And though they be small, they must be reliable and durable enough to be read hundreds of thousands of times.
The interface is entirely tactile, and the device is simply rife with buttons to navigate menus and files, enter and edit text, and manage physical and wireless connections.
At the top of the unit, there is an eight-key keyboard that is analogous to the six-key keyboard on the Perkins Brailler. Each key corresponds to one dot. Below that is the row of Braille cells, each of which has a small button above it which are used for cursor routing and text manipulations. On either side of the braille display are three buttons used to navigate whatever text, file, or website you are reading. The bottommost row contains a little joystick they call a NaviStick, used to navigate the operating system, four system keys, and two space bars.
In independent notetaker mode, the VarioUltra has its own OS with a suite of productivity apps: a text reader and word processor, PDF viewer, spreadsheet viewer, calculator, etc.
I can store files on there, from notes and handouts to whole books. It’s finally going to make Braille portable for me in a real and useful way. I mean, if you wanted to take a book to the park or coffeeshop to read, what would you rather carry?
When it’s hooked up to an iPhone, I can use it to read my email, articles, websites, facebook, twitter, and any other accessible material that’s available.
Since this is my first Braille display, I anticipate a steep learning curve. To be honest, i haven’t even turned it on yet. This isn’t the intuitive, easy to pick up and start using technology we’ve gotten so used to. It’s the kind of technology where you read all the documentation before you even get started, and it still takes a while to get up to speed. With the crazy week i had, I just haven’t had that kind of time. That’s what the next few days are for.
I’m excited to get to know this device. I’m excited to carry Braille with me, to be able to read and work quietly again, and to get better and faster at reading Braille because I’m using it more and using it more seriously. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!
(This post is part 2 in a series. See Part One here.)
The second Braille gadget I acquired was the legendary Perkins Brailler. My case worker at the Department of Rehabilitation had an extra one lying around the warehouse, so he told me to take it home and see if I liked it. I wasn’t interested at first, thinking I would be getting some higher tech gizmos soon, and this one would just end up on a shelf. I’m glad I gave it a try, because it is a cool little machine and it has been a lot of fun to play around with.
So what exactly is a Brailler? Essentially, it is a manual Braille typewriter.
Mechanical Braillewriters first appeared in 1892, but before the invention of the Perkins Brailler, they had all been expensive, fragile, and unreliable. When Dr. Gabriel Farrell took over as head of the Perkins School for the Blind in 1931, he determined to create a portable, durable, and inexpensive Brailler. He commissioned David Abraham, a woodworker who taught manual trades at the school, to design and engineer the project. The venture was funded by the Perkins School’s subsidiary, Howe Press, at a substantial financial risk. By the time the first run of units was produced, Howe Press had expended more than half of its capital on the project.
Mr. Abraham spent around 15 years engineering the Perkins Brailler, and his skill and perfectionism showed. After its release in 1951, the company could barely keep up with demand. It was quite simply the best and most reliable Brailler on the market, and set the standard for other Braillers to meet for fifty years. Now there is a new and improved model, but I have one of the trusty originals.
Note that the keyboard only has nine keys. The six main keys, three per side, each emboss one of the six dots in a Braille cell. The inner two correspond to the top row, the next ones out to the middle row, and the furthest out to the bottom row. The raised button on the left is a line break, the one on the right is a backspace, and the middle button is space. The carriage must be returned manually to the beginning after every line break, using that swoopy piece of plastic just above the keyboard.
Since each main key controls only one dot, every character must be typed by pressing the correct combination of keys simultaneously. If you miss a dot, you can use the backspace key to set the carriage over the previous cell and easily add it in. It’s not nearly as fast as typing on a QWERTY keyboard, but it is much, much faster than the slate and stylus. That page of notes that took me two hours before? Now I could type it in five or ten minutes.
On top of that, it’s just plain fun to use. You can feed most kinds of paper into it, which means you can emboss on blank paper or add Braille to just about any printed page, card, gift tag, etc. Since I got my hands on it, I’ve been Brailling everything in sight.
The Upshot: This is still not the apotheosis of Braille technology, but its simplicity and versatility mean that I will probably always find uses for it.
Reference:
Jan Seymour-Ford. “History of the Perkins Brailler.” Outlook for the Blind (Nov. 2009).
My new Bluetooth Braille display finally arrived in the mail!
It has been on back order since December, and I’ve had these long weeks of waiting to think about Braille writing and how the technology has evolved over time. I have a few other Braille gadgets, and I realized my acquisitions had unintentionally imitated the course of Braille-writing technology.
So this week I am going to share a bit about the tools I have and how useful they are. I don’t have something from every stage in the development of Braille tech, but it will be enough to give you a general idea.
Let’s start at the very beginning.
Welcome to the nineteenth century! This simple tool was invented even before Braille. Napoleon wanted a way for his armies to communicate at night, without light or sound, so he commissioned a guy named Charles Barbier to create a writing system that could be read without any light. Barbier had the idea of using fingers to read raised dots and lines. He invented a system and the slate and stylus to write it. His system was too complicated and never caught on, but Louis Braille learned about it a few decades later, and simplified it to create the six-dot Braille system we use today.
I got my slate and stylus last August from the Lighthouse for the Blind in San Francisco. I picked it up on a whim, because I wanted practice using my newly acquired Braille and this was the cheapest and simplest way to get started.
It works kind of like a stencil. The slate is a hinged piece of metal that clamps onto a sheet of paper. It provides a template that ensures the exact spacing necessary to create readable Braille. To write, you have to press the stylus, a blunt awl, into the appropriate guide holes.
One dot at a time.
Backwards.
That’s right, backwards. Because you’re poking the dots in from the back to raise them on the front side, you have to write every line and every cell in the wrong direction, like writing in a mirror.
It takes forever.
And then you flip it over to see how many mistakes you made.
The problem is, since Braille cells have two columns of dots, almost every character is the mirror image of another one. If you aren’t paying attention and forget to flip them, you end up with ‘i’ instead of ‘e’ or ‘z’ instead of ‘and.’ One time I was making a sheet of notes. It took me more than two hours. and when I was done it was filled with typos (Braille-os? stylos? I don’t know).
You can get a better sense of the process by using this neat Slate and Stylus Simulator I found.
The Upshot: it’s better than nothing, but barely.
A couple of weeks ago, I went into the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco to hear a presentation by my friend Robert Englebretson. Robert is a professor of linguistics at Rice University. He is blind, and I met him through an email group of blind academics. In addition to his primary linguistic research on Indonesian languages, Robert has begun to research Braille reading using the tools of cognitive linguistics. It’s exciting research that points the way toward better Braille for everyone.
This particular presentation was about a study he had done on Braille contractions with his Rice colleague Simon Fischer-Baum. I haven’t said much about contracted Braille since my very first post, so I’ll recap: in order to save space and increase reading speed, there are a bunch of contractions that reduce the length of common letter combinations and words. Some of these contractions have to appear by themselves, but others can be used as parts of larger words. These include small groups of letters like [er], [ch], [ing], and [the], as well as words like [time], [ever}, and [less].
In English Braille, these contractions were determined largely by statistical frequency. The most common letter combinations and words got contracted, meaning the most possible space got saved on the page. In the days when huge tomes had to be hand-Brailled, this made a lot of sense, but it’s a practice that benefits the producers of Braille, and its effect on readers had never been studied.
For decades, the prevailing assumption in Braille education has held that blind Braille readers expand all of the contracted words into their full print form before interpreting them. If this is true, then all contractions should be equally readable. But are they?
Granted, there are some contracted spellings that everybody agrees are a bad idea. My favorite is this gem:
⠡⠑⠐⠍⠁⠏⠽
In English characters, that’s
[ch] [e] [mother] [a] [p] [y]
Chemotherapy. Sure, it’s space-efficient—it shortens a twelve-letter word to seven cells. But the two-cell (dot 5, m) contraction for [mother] is so ingrained to mean “mother” that everyone inevitably reads it something like “Key-mother-a-pee.” Is saving the space of five cells on the page worth losing a few seconds every time you have to make sense of this word? Not to me.
Robert set out to show that the same process happens in less egregious situations as well. You don’t often run into contractions as bad as “chemotherapy,” but there are many, many examples of contractions that cause momentary confusion and delays in comprehension. Take ”redo” for example, which can be written in Braille as [r] [ed] [o]. Most people can’t help but read it as “red-o.”
Basically, Robert theorized that reading problems occur when contractions conflict with our understanding of a word’s sublexical structure. We all intuitively understand that some words are made up of smaller units that have been smooshed together. “Redo” is the verb “do,” plus the prefix “re-.” We understand it as a two-part word, and when the [ed] contraction effectively erases the boundary between the two parts, we stumble over the reading.
And this is exactly what he found in a large number of similar cases. I won’t go into the methodology or technical details here, but Robert was able to show that fluent Braille readers took longer to comprehend words when contractions crossed sublexical boundaries than they did when the contractions did not cross boundaries. This implies that Braille readers are reading those contractions as single units, covering up any dividing lines that may exist within them. In other words, the theory that Braille readers uncontract words before they process them does not hold up.
To me, sitting in the audience, Robert’s results seemed right on. To be fair, I remember a time when I did have to uncontract every word I read. When I was first learning contracted Braille, I had to picture every word in my head, building each one letter by letter as I read each cell. But this was just a symptom of my inexperience, and I moved past it quickly. After a month or so, I no longer had to picture the words I was reading. Instead, the cells brought sounds into my mind—whether letters, syllables, or entire words.
Then, maybe a month ago, something different happened. I brushed my finger over some Braille text and all of a sudden the meaning of the words came into my head. Not the sounds, the meanings. It felt surreal, how automatic it was. I took that for granted with print reading—for most print readers it becomes so automatic that it isn’t even a choice. Text is read as soon as it is seen, whether you like it or not. It was very strange to have that sensation in Braille.
Right now that only happens with very simple language. Less common words take a little longer, and rare words or weird contracted spellings can trip me up pretty bad. As I gain experience, more will become automatic and everything will come faster, but Robert’s research suggests that some contracted spellings will never stop slowing me down.
The study shows that cognitive linguistics can provide valuable insights into Braille reading, and points the way toward further research. In time, we may be able to more precisely distinguish between contractions that help and contractions that hinder, We may also come to see which other features of the current Braille system improve speed and comprehension, and which do not. Eventually, research like this could influence best practices that optimize Braille for the human beings who read it rather than pages it is embossed on.
I just got home from San Antonio, where I attended the Annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. SBL, as we call it, is the largest conference of biblical scholars in the world, and it’s held in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion. This means that for one weekend a year, thousands upon thousands of scholars in biblical and religious studies descend upon one unsuspecting American city.
The scope of the thing is truly mind-boggling. There are hundreds of papers and presentations each day, covering every conceivable topic within and around biblical studies and religion. It’s a great place for scholars to hear about new discoveries, new ideas, and new approaches, and to share their own ideas and get feedback before committing them to print. But the best part is reconnecting with friends and colleagues and meeting new ones. The conversations over dinners and drinks are consistently stimulating and gloriously nerdy.
For me, SBL also offers a chance to reflect on how I am changing and still need to change as my sight wanes. It’s a different experience every year.
The most noticeable change this year: I used my white cane. Last year I brought it with me, and I carried it in my bag throughout the weekend, but I never actually took it out to use it. This time I had it out almost the entire time. Inside and in daylight I don’t really need it for the large-scale tasks of orientation and navigation, but it warns me of curbs, planters, and benches, and warns people around me that I will definitely run into them if they don’t move. At night on the narrow and winding Riverwalk, on the other hand, I needed the cane (and a few timely nudges from my friends) to keep from taking a swim.
The social and networking aspect of the conference keeps changing, too. I’ve never been great at picking faces out of a crowd, but now it’s near impossible. I’m sure I walked right by dozens of people I should have said hello to, and failed to notice friends and colleagues attending sessions with me. Name tags are useless, so I’m sure I also miss out on meeting scholars whose work I know but have never met in person.
Even meeting close friends can be disorienting. Suddenly someone appears right in front of me, or beside me walking in lockstep, and it takes a few seconds to piece together who they are from their voice and whatever visual clues I can get. Sometimes I start a hug or a handshake without knowing who’s on the other side, and recognize them halfway through. Luckily, my assumption that people who want to hug me or shake my hand generally have a good reason to do so hasn’t backfired yet!
I am curious to see how my experience of the conference changes over time. It will continue to provide a benchmark for my vision and adaptation, as well as for my scholarly career. Next year I plan to present a paper—a dual novelty since it will be my first paper at an academic conference and my first presentation from Braille notes!
It’s been a quiet month here on the blog, because life outside the blog has been a whirlwind. My parents came into town for two weeks to help me clear some of the last medical and bureaucratic hurdles involved in relocating and getting social services. There’s a lot of bureaucracy involved in going blind—a lot of paperwork and visits to doctors and government buildings, then a lot of waiting, then more visits to doctors and government buildings. My parents graciously ferried me all over the Bay, condensing errands that would have taken me weeks into a few days.
It was the big push at the end of a long year of change. About this time last year my dissertation proposal was accepted by the faculty in my department and I became officially A.B.D. I had already been legally blind for a year before that, but the proposal marked a turning point. It was the last piece of work I was able to complete without radically changing my process to accommodate reduced vision.
And since then? Well, I haven’t made substantial progress on the actual dissertation in almost a year.
It’s not like I’ve been idle. Our family moved across the country and settled in a new town. Kristin started a new job in a new career. Jane turned from a baby into a toddler. I learned Braille and mobility skills, dove deep into accessibility, and developed new workflows for research and writing.
Looking back, it feels like I spent the year in some kind of professional chrysalis, a space that allowed me to process, change, and transform. Now I feel like I can finally return to the work I set out to do in the first place. It won’t be smooth and easy sailing as a beautiful blind butterfly, but at least I’m ready to start moving forward.
Emily K. Michael of the On the Blink blog is running a series of interviews with neat blind folks for October, which happens to be Blindness Awareness Month. I participated in the project, and my interview can be found here.
Go check it out and look at some of the other interviews as well!
I sense that there is a change happening in my writing, because there is a change in how I write. I used to write, like most people, silently. My eyes and fingers worked together to lay down words on the page.
When you compose with your eyes, you read over what you’ve written with your internal voice. You supply all of the missing elements of speech: tone, emphasis, pause, and all the other things that add texture and life to the words on the page.
When I used to write with my eyes, I would become so familiar with the way I read a piece of text in my head that I could not imagine it any other way. I never considered that those invisible auditory elements would not be immediately evident to any other reader. At least, not until I came back to a piece of writing a few days later, when I had forgotten the finer details, the shape and flow of each individual sentence. Then I would inevitably puzzle over a phrase or paragraph until I realized how I had meant it to be read. I found these pitfalls lurking in the writing of others, too—places where the emphasis or tone was important but not apparent, waiting like rocks in tall grass to trip up unsuspecting readers.
Now I write with VoiceOver. It is Apple’s main accessibility feature, which gives immediate audio feedback for every character, word and sentence that I write, and reads me paragraphs so I can remind myself of their flow and argument. It is a multi-sensory experience, since I still see the words appearing on my screen, sometimes zoomed in close enough to read them but most often not. I used to find the constant wash of letters and words distracting and intrusive, but in the few weeks since I’ve started writing this way exclusively, it has become natural and I feel adrift when it is turned off.
When VoiceOver reads every word, line, sentence, and paragraph, it supplies its own intonation, emphasis, and rhythm. Computer voices today are not the abrasive robot voices of the eighties and nineties. They are getting closer and closer to the sound of natural speech. No one would mistake them for human, but developers are focused on improving their realism and fluency in reading long passages. So the computer adds pauses, shifts its tone, and inflects words up or down based on how it interprets the context. All those choices I used to make in composing, usually without even thinking about it, are now made by the computer. The computer becomes a controlling voice in my writing, because if it reads something awkwardly, I often change the text.
Of course, I don’t always cede to the computer. Sometimes it is obviously wrong (like when it pronounces a homonym inappropriately, like “read” as red instead of reed) or its interpretation is clumsily rule-bound (like when it thinks “Mr.” is the end of a sentence). But if the computer’s reading is misleading, ambiguous, or simply awkward, I will often rewrite it. I just can’t bear to hear the voice stumble over the same passage dozens of times as I write and edit, so I alter it to accommodate the computer’s flow.
The big question is, how will this affect my writing? Will it become more stilted or robotic as I adapt to a computerized interpretation of natural language? I hope not. My hope is that the instant feedback will remind me to consider the auditory dimensions of language more carefully than I did before. VoiceOver, imperfect as it is, is an audience that is present and interactive at every stage of my writing process, letting me know what I’ve written and at least one way it can be read. If it makes a mistake, there’s a chance another reader would also have made that mistake. VoiceOver was developed by people, after all, and those people defined the interpretive choices it makes.
VoiceOver is changing my writing, but how remains to be seen. I guess I’ll just have to wait for you, my human readers, to let me know.