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!
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.
In Act One of this epic tale, our hero had fallen on dark days. Forced away from Mellel, his comfortable word-processing home, he began to wander the land seeking new possibilities and brighter horizons.
Now we see him revisiting familiar territory. Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 is already installed on his machine, after all. But it too offers only disappointment. Hazardous to navigate and full of unmarked and unlabeled dangers, it is a VoiceOver nightmare.
He considers other options: Pages, VoiceDream Writer. These are friendly and accessible, but nowhere near full-featured enough for a dissertation. He falls to using TextEdit—at least it works well with VoiceOver. Perhaps he will write his whole dissertation in plain text and typeset it with LaTeX. But of course this is absurd. Navigating a document as long as a dissertation in plain text would be next to impossible. Plus he would have to learn LaTeX, so…
And then at last, on the verge of despair, he finds hope. There is a new version of Microsoft Word for Mac, and it has been substantially rebuilt and reconfigured. Word has always had features galore, of course, and is capable of handling large projects like books and dissertations. In the new 2016 version, the development team has increased VoiceOver compatibility and improved support for Hebrew (as long as the Hebrew keyboard is used).
Almost all of the buttons, tabs, and menus are clearly labeled for VoiceOver, and navigating the interface is relatively easy. Setting VoiceOver Hotspots for the ribbon and main text pane makes it even more painless. The only problem with this is that the Hotspots for the ribbon are document-specific, so if you have two documents open at the same time, you have to make sure you go to the correct ribbon.
Navigating long documents can also be cumbersome. You can navigate by page or line, but it would be very useful to be able to navigate within your document structure. The VoiceOver rotor could come in handy here, connecting the headings menu to document headings and allowing users to skip back and forth that way.
The biggest bug in Word for Mac 2016 comes when documents get long and cover multiple pages. If you make changes to early pages in the document that affect later pages, VoiceOver can get confused about what it should be reading . When you use the “Read Line” or “Read Paragraph” commands, it will read the wrong line or paragraph, or start or stop too early. When this happens, closing and reopening the document solves the problem, It is not insurmountable, but it does get very tedious.
Track Changes and Comments—two critical tools in academic work—are also difficult to use, but these are acknowledged issues that Word is working to improve.
So our hero takes up this tool, imperfect though it is, and sets his hand to the work. But his vigilance remains constant, and from afar he hears rumours of a new kind of tool: a powerful writing suite with deep VoiceOver compatibility. Tune in next time, brave readers, as our hero encounters…the Scrivener.
(This epic post reviewed MS Word for Mac 2016 Version 15.24. Any subsequent improvements to accessibility in later versions are not covered)