21–30 of 36 posts
Anyone has any recommendations for a cheap braille display and can explain quick quick how it integrates in a programmer's workflow? I'm an EMACS user, I've seen a bunch of packages that integrate with BRLTTY, but I'm curious what's the day-to-day. I'm not blind, so this shouldn't be something that'll take away from someone with a real need; this is just one nerd's attempt at learning another (practically speaking, u…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many blind people have enough residual vision to locate the label, but they can't read text for example. In Germany, the packaging for medicine features Braille that's hard to miss. Apart from that, I'm sure there are standards and building codes and such that regulate this.
More than 90% of blind people can see the sun. In the us blind means you vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200, without glasses my vision is worse than that, so if I can do it without glasses some blind can as well. (Of course my vision is correctable to perfection)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
you need fast refresh speed with pins which are steady under pressure while reading. Also, it should be packed so that you can have 6/8 pins to form a braille cell. the rest is a breeze. personally, I think that braille is just not worth it for normal reading, but you can't do any stem without it because math is not linear like normal text and tts just sucks.
I met a blind person studying computer science. I asked him why he used a speech synthesiser instead of a Braille display and he replied that he'd love to have a Braille display but they are far too expensive for a mere student. (The sounds that emerged from his speech synthesiser didn't much resemble human speech but he was used to it and it was obviously quite a lot faster than normal human speech.)
Anyone has any recommendations for a cheap braille display and can explain quick quick how it integrates in a programmer's workflow? I'm an EMACS user, I've seen a bunch of packages that integrate with BRLTTY, but I'm curious what's the day-to-day. I'm not blind, so this shouldn't be something that'll take away from someone with a real need; this is just one nerd's attempt at learning another (practically speaking, u…
For example, at the moment you can get one for less than 500€: https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-braillezeile/k0
I bought a couple of them and sent them to a friend in France who is himself blind and active in an association to help people with learning braille. Interestingly, France has not that many second-hand braille tablets. I suppose that it is because in Germany you can get them paid by the health insurance, this makes it easier for people to get access to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than 90% of blind people can see the sun. In the us blind means you vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200, without glasses my vision is worse than that, so if I can do it without glasses some blind can as well. (Of course my vision is correctable to perfection)
Interesting, I only ever imagined blindness to be total darkness and absence of sight. One great example among many of how you can't effectively design accommodations for a particular disability without getting input from someone who has that disability.
Most of the "blind" definition is around driving and reading.
Anyone has any recommendations for a cheap braille display and can explain quick quick how it integrates in a programmer's workflow? I'm an EMACS user, I've seen a bunch of packages that integrate with BRLTTY, but I'm curious what's the day-to-day. I'm not blind, so this shouldn't be something that'll take away from someone with a real need; this is just one nerd's attempt at learning another (practically speaking, u…
Maybe my experience will be useful to you. Do it for the plasticity.
a high level writeup is here: https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/learning%20braille....
can talk separately in more detail, although for my purposes the code parts are pretty minimal. Brltty does a good job, and so did eBay for me when I started.
Anyone has any recommendations for a cheap braille display and can explain quick quick how it integrates in a programmer's workflow? I'm an EMACS user, I've seen a bunch of packages that integrate with BRLTTY, but I'm curious what's the day-to-day. I'm not blind, so this shouldn't be something that'll take away from someone with a real need; this is just one nerd's attempt at learning another (practically speaking, u…
For computers, there’s a third step: learning how your screen reader works.
The first is hard on its own, and may be effectively unachievable for elderly persons (the sensitivity of your fingers goes down with age)
The second and third you can exercise without hardware with some (¿most?) screen readers. For example, Apples voiceover has a braille panel (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/voiceover/vo15603/mac)
Enable that and cover the rest of the screen to force yourself to not cheat by looking at the screen, and you’ve a cheap testing setup.
it seems like making building an electronic braille display is an interesting side project. i don't know, 30 units of display thingy that sized similar to mahjong tiles, two buttons to change them to "next line" and "prev line", and maybe a raspberry pi and one sdcard for each book maybe enough to build it? of course the difficult part is the "display thingy". not sure if they have it in shenzhen.
you need fast refresh speed with pins which are steady under pressure while reading. Also, it should be packed so that you can have 6/8 pins to form a braille cell. the rest is a breeze. personally, I think that braille is just not worth it for normal reading, but you can't do any stem without it because math is not linear like normal text and tts just sucks.
TMAP – On Demand Tactile Street Map https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901794
Only four comments including a link to https://www.instructables.com/OpenBraille-a-DIY-Braille-Embo... and PixBlaster
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Braille displays are pretty common, but awfully expensive. If your side project ends up costing less than $1000, you're on a good track. Most of them are in the $2000-$7000 range, with the exception of Orbit Reader 20 which is only $800 (although many online shops seem to be permanently out of stock, I don't know if it's really sold at that price).
I had a blind classmate back in high school (starting ~2008) who used a laptop and a single-line braille display, and wow I did not know her equipment was that expensive! It just seemed like a reasonably straight-forward piece of hardware to me.
Maybe that feeling goes away with fluency, which I can't speak to, but I have a lot of respect for the engineering that goes into these displays. Granted, I'm not a hardware person.