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.
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.
acdha 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
joshdavham 1 hours ago [-]
> English Braille [...] consists of around 250 letters
That is fascinating! I always assumed it had the same number of letters as normal written English.
Jeremy1026 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 02:51:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
That is fascinating! I always assumed it had the same number of letters as normal written English.