Braille is cool, but why do they need it?
Couldn’t they use normal characters ‘punched’ onto paper, leaving an impression, but not going through?
They could also use numerous tiny pinpricks akin to dot-matrix printers.
This would also help them to ‘read’ printing in other situations without having to learn a whole 'nother language.
As a follow-up, is braille in other languages very different, or is it an extension of the original braille alphabet?
Thanks.
Your fingertips don’t have nearly the same perceptual resolution as your eyes; before Braille was invented (by Louis Braille), special books were made for the blind with raised ordinary letters, but in order to be readable the letters had to be huge.
Braille characters are designed to be distinctive and compact.
Oops - hasty correction; apparently it isn’t entirely true to say that Louis Braille invented Braille, as he refined an earlier military system invented by Charles Barbier.
It isn’t a special language, the dots go to English letters and numbers. (and some abriviations)
I think originally they tried raised print, but that didnt’ work out. see http://www.brailler.com/braillehx.htm for lots of info
There are devices that move little cylanders akin to dot matrix printers. I think there aree some that read a line of text, do the OCR, and do the whole line in Braille.
Brian