| Monday, October 22nd, 2007 | |||||||||||
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    In other Potter related news... In my quest to own all of the translations of the Philosophers Stone, I just got delivered one that is not a translation so much as an English transliteration: braille! :) I've actually always been fascinated by Braille and have always wanted to learn to read it. I also got some educational materials at the same time, although they haven't arrived yet. I shouldn't have been surprised by the size, but I was! It came in 4 volumes: 11"x11"x6" in total. In one respect I was surprised by how easy it is to read -- with your eyes... for the most part it's a substitution alphabet, although there are a lot of contractions. I've always been good with substitution alphabets -- usually within a few minutes I can start to read them nearly fluently. The contractions complicate things, but its still pretty tractable. But trying to work out the patterns tactilely! That will be the challenge. Just playing around a little bit, I think that movement is really important -- just touching the character, it's hard to distinguish, but sliding across really aids the perception. I can see how starting to move quickly across the lines can also be really helpful -- you get a much better wholistic impression of the contours of the word, just like you would visually and combined with the top-down influences that a fluent reader would have, I can see how it could become very natural. Another thing that surprised me is that the pages are double-sided. It makes sense -- offset the pages just a little so that the points don't interfere with each other, and you can't really feel the embossing from the over-page. VISUALLY though, it's impossible to read... It's like trying to distinguish over-typed text. So cool! I also started glancing around at some of the devices that are available now for blind people -- PDAs etc. Also some really cool ideas. I'm thinking how awesome it would be to have a Braille PDA that you could just hold on to; it would scroll text across your fingers... imagine how useful that would be for reading on the train in Japan? Or reading in bed at night without disturbing your partner by having the light on? Or for people (like me) that have bad neck issues -- it would be so great to just be able to lie back and not have hold my head in an uncomfortable reading position for so long. Not to mention how many other possibilities there could be for interesting interfaces... Just off the top of my head, what if you could read important indicators off of your stickshift instead of the display? You wouldn't have to have your eyes off the road as much. Of course, it's a bit of a pipe-dream because the availability of reading materials in braille is pretty pathetic... Of course, as electronic media become more available, hopefully that would change. Braille transcription could be a pretty automated thing (complicated yes -- there's more to it than one might think -- but certainly easier than text-to-speech) so if you had a PDA... Sadly it appears that Braille is becoming less and less popular as speech technologies improve... I think it's technologically more flexible, and there's a much shorter learning curve. PS. With this one, I'm up to 27 of 68 (give or take how you interpret unauthorized translations and transliterations etc.) | |||||||||||
| Comments | |||||||||||
The idea of scrolling text across your fingers is really really cool. It would be great for spies too :-) Congrats on the new notch in your belt as well! (Reply to this) (Thread) Braille is cool! I learnt it in high school to communicate with a friend. :) Your local CNIB is an excellent resource, don't hesitate to check them out. They can, among other things, sell you an excellent and inexpensive slate and stylus so you can practice writing in Braille yourself - it's an interesting experience, since you're writing from the other side of the piece of paper. The tactile PDA is a really cool idea - I wonder if anyone's come up with anything like that. However, you're absolutely right that speech-reading technology does take over where Braille leaves off; I was astounded by how quickly my friend listened to the read-back from his computer - I couldn't make out a single thing! He did have a computer in which he could type in Braille, though - six keys, where he would press the ones needed to make the symbol simultaneously. (Reply to this) (Thread) | |||||||||||
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