Talk:Braille
From Academic Kids
Are Grade 2 or 3 machinable? I mean,is there a good enough algorithm that takes plain ASCII and renders it as Grade 2 or 3? I suppose that's what Braille line interfaces use.
Could someone include information about readers of braille? e.g. Do they read faster/slower than visual readers. Also, how do the blind read languages with ideographic alphabets, such as Japanese?
So far as I can tell, the span of speeds for braille readers is similar to the span for sighted readers, though I'm not absolutely certain. I agree that it would be nice to know about such systems for charactersets such as kana or kanji.
I'm not sure what you mean by "are grade two and three machineable". (Then again, I hadn't heard of grade 3 until reading the article). If by that you mean grade2 can be taken from plain text, there are programs such as Duxberry that do this (Granted not always perfectly). Duxberry isn't made to handle a lot of symbols that are more commonly rendered in Nemith (Though some surprise me, such as its refusal to print a + correctly).
How do the blind read Japanese? I will research this! Currently I rely on finding things in romaji.
There are alternate systems for languages that are very different from english. http://www.hi.sfc.keio.ac.jp/access/arc/NetBraille/etc/brttrl.html is a website containing a tootorial for Japanese braille that explains a little (That's just the first result, a google search comes up with much more).
It might also need to be noted that accented characters(ë, ç, ì +ñ) can be displayed in different ways in braille (The methods have say in grade2 sommantics).
- "For example, the numeral 6 stands for "ff," but may only be used within a word, not at the beginning or end."
How does this save space, if two characters need to be used to represent the numeral six anyways (the number sign, then F)? Also, why is it explicitly stated that it can't be used at the beginning of a word, since there are no words beginning with "ff"? — Ливай | ☺ 23:56, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
The reference to the number 6 means the braille dot pattern that you get for the ASCII number "6" if you send a "6" to a braille embosser or refreshable display. This assumes that the embosser uses the Code for Computer Braille Notation that's in common use in North America. So, this "6" is a single character having dots 2-3-5, what we'd call a "dropped f", the letter "f" lowered in the dot pattern so that it occupies the lower 4 dots area of the standard 6-dot cell. In grade 2 braille, (now often called "contracted braille") the number 6 would be written as a number sign followed by the letter "f", but that's a completely different character than that "6" that represents "ff". As for the position dependence of that "6" for "ff", a dropped f at the beginning of a word is an abbreviation for the word "to". In the middle of the word it's "ff". At the end of a word it's an exclamation point. So you see, it's a busy little symbol. Weichbrodt 16:59, May 17, 2005 (UTC)
Ever hear of Jasper Fforde? DS 12:04, 17 May 2005 (UTC)
