#Braille

[itscolossal]

Turn-of-the-Century Tactile Graphics Illustrate Nature for People Who Are Blind

[iloveabortions]

Shaun Leane: 'Contra Mundum' 18-Karat White Gold & Diamond Evening Glove (2010)

[hbmmaster]

I used to think of braille like it's a digital text encoding scheme (if you know a little bit about how braille works and a lot about how computers store text, it feels "obvious" that braille dot patters are six-bit binary encodings of characters) but the more I've learned about it the more I've understood how wrong that is.

for one, braille is not an encoding of the latin alphabet. you can transliterate between the latin alphabet and braille the same way as you can transliterate between any two writing systems, but they really are completely separate scripts that follow completely different rules. converting to and from braille is a hard problem that depends on the specific orthography of the language being used, and within individual languages still is often very context sensitive.

for example, english braille (in some standards) spells the word "a" differently from the letter "a": they both use the same character that's used when the vowel appears within longer words, but when the letter "a" is used as a letter and not as the word, it (in some standards) requires an additional character to specify that you mean the letter.

also, braille isn't digital at all. it's designed for people, not computers. the earliest version of braille is from 1824, decades before the earliest machines you could reasonably describe as computers. braille was designed for humans, and it follows conventions that are reasonable for people but make no sense for computers. it's rare for two related dot patterns to be differentiated by "flipping one of the bits" like you'd do with a binary text encoding; instead you get things like rotating flipping or moving the pattern, which certainly feels a lot more like a writing system than an encoding of a writing system.

[zegalba]

Patrick Tosani: Portraits (1985)

[kingsbridgelibraryteens]

“Reading is for everyone.”

Here is one of the coolest things I've found stuck in a library book recently! It's a bookmark from the Library of Congress that's in print and also incorporates a message in braille. It's advertising the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled.

Learn more at the NLS website:

ETA: Thanks for all the love for this post!!! Here's a reblogged version which includes some great comments and a very helpful ID!!!

[janmisali]

been doing something ill-advised and trying to get an intuition for how braille works visually

[runawaymarbles]

[3therealplanes]

Body Type by Ina Saltz

[transformativeworks]

OTW is having its October membership drive!  Check out or new donor gifts including a Contracted Unified English Braille sticker reading "I [heart] my fandoms" (3 inches by 2.5 inches/7.62 by 6.35 cm) and translated AO3 tags logo sticker (3.5 inches/8.89 cm). Find out more at https://otw.news/pkd

[beardedmrbean]

I bet she didn't see that coming

[hbmmaster]

just realized my phone doesn't display some braille characters correctly. the dot pattern [⠸] is supposed to be the right three dots, but on my phone it looks the same as [⠇] with the left three dots. that's a really weird problem and I don't know how they messed that up

[californiastatelibrary]

January is Braille Literacy Month! In honor of this celebration, we want to remind you that BTBL offers the Braille-on-Demand program. As a patron, you can request up to five books a month in hardcopy braille to keep indefinitely for your personal use. Choose from any of the tens of thousands of braille titles available in our catalog to add to your home library! https://www.loc.gov/nls/services-and-resources/braille-on-demand/

[yesterdays-xkcd]

The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.

Braille [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

I learned to read braille a while back, and I've noticed that the messages on signs don't always match the regular text. [A sign reads "Third Floor Office" with braille print underneath. Cueball is reading the braille.] Cueball (thinking): s-i-g-h-t-e-d-p-e-o-p-l-e-s-u-c-k ... Hey!

[runawaymarbles]

So I made an error.