I’ve felt Braille on elevators and such, and came to realize it would take me a lot of time and practice for me to merely distinguish what I’m feeling, likely a lot more work than simply learning what translates to what.
Anybody here ever tried to learn Braille just to learn it? I’m assuming there aren’t any blind folks reading the board with tools to assist, which of course could be a very incorrect assumption.
Am I correct that learning to recognize the symbol is more difficult than remembering which letter/number it translates to (for most people)?
I started trying to learn it for no reason at all once. Didn’t get very far, but I remember that each letter is a rectangle of six bumps, in a 2x3 formation:
…
…
…
And each of the six is either raised (a bump) or not raised (no bump) and at any given moment you only have to feel one specific set of 6, and interpret it as a letter. Very common words are given one letter abbreviations. IIRC, “you” is represented by the symbol for “Y”
I used to work with a blind man, doing some secretarial work, and after about a month started recognizing stuff written in Grade II Braille… I’m sure if I had been motivated I could have learned it reasonably quickly. (Have pretty much forgetten it all by now, though)
On the other hand, I also worked with a woman who lost her sight (actually, was still in the process of losing it) late in life and while she could read Grade I, her grasp of Grade II was pretty shakey and in fact she opted to avoid Braille most of the time.
I expected the ease with which you pick this up varies from person to person.
I have tried from time to time to get the hang of reading Braille. I find it VERY difficult. First, as you surmise, it is really tough to get your fingers to recognize the layout of the dots. The resolution seems impossibly poor, and I have a terrible time trying to stay lined up. Secondly, “simply learning what translates to what” isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, either. There are 63 different Braille signs, and most of them can have several different meanings, depending on context and the preceding sign.
So for example, a cell with dots 2,3, and 5 could mean “to”, or “ff” , or “!”. The sign used for “n” also means “not”, or if it’s preceded by dot 5 it means “name”; but if it’s preceded by certain other signs, it can mean “-sion”, “-tion”, or “-ation”.
And then there are the abbreviations! There are 189 special Grade II Braille contractions, such as “bet” to mean “between”, “ll” to mean “little”, and “lr” to mean “letter”.
Anyways, I still can’t read Braille in the dark, but if I make full use of my eyes I can almost manage. I’ve gotten half-way through the first Harry Potter book in Braille. But when I read out loud, I sound just like a six-year-old slowly sounding out words.
I suppose it must be just like reading as a child - you have to experience the letters serially and 'build the words, whereas a sighted adult reader will often experience a large number of common words instantly by their shape as a whole.