Braille (reading)

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Braille Writing Writer Machine.

Blist machine for braille writing.

Pharmaceutical United States with braille.

Braille writing Perkins machine.

Braille (pronounced /bráille/, /bráiye/ or /bráile/) is a tactile reading and writing system designed for blind people. It is also known as cecography. It was devised in the mid-19th century by the Frenchman Louis Braille (1809-1852), who became blind due to an accident during his childhood while playing in his father's workshop. When he was 13 years old, the director of the School for the Blind and Deaf in Paris – where the young Braille was studying – asked him to try a tactile literacy system invented by a soldier named Charles Barbier de la Serre to transmit orders to outposts without need to give away the position at night. Louis Braille discovered after a while that the system was valid and reinvented it using an 8-dot system. After a few years he simplified it leaving it in the universally known and adopted system of 6 points.

Braille is also interesting because it is a binary numbering system that preceded the advent of computing.

The Braille Alphabet

Since 1825, when Louis Braille devised his system of raised dots, blind people have had a valid and efficient tool to read, write, compose or engage in computing.

Braille is not a language, but an alphabet. Letters, punctuation marks, numbers, scientific spelling, mathematical symbols, music, etc. can be represented with braille. Braille typically consists of cells of six raised dots, arranged as a three-row by two-column matrix, which are conventionally numbered from top to bottom and left to right.

There are braille signographies to represent shorthand (generated with a machine that marks dots on a paper tape) and to represent mathematical notations, also called the Unified Mathematical Code, and musical notations.

With the introduction of computing, braille was expanded to an eight-dot code, so that an individual letter can be encoded with a single cell, with a cell representing any ASCII character. The 256 possible combinations of the eight dots are encoded according to the Unicode standard.

The introduction of Information Access Technologies has generated a need to establish new computer and electronic signographies published by the Spanish Braille Commission in January 2009. Braille can be written manually using an iron and a punch, so so that each dot is generated from the back of the page, written in a symmetrical image (like looking in a mirror), with a braille writer (for example, Perkins, Blista, and Writer) with a printer braille connected to a computer, or through a braille display.

Generation of signs

The presence or absence of dots allows the encoding of symbols. Through these six points, also called the generating sign, 64 different combinations are obtained. The presence or absence of a point in each position determines which letter it is.

The French alphabet is the one that serves as the basis for the genesis of the other alphabets and develops in 7 generation series that are described as follows:

• 1.a generation series: they are a combination of the four upper points and represent the first ten letters (from the a to the lower j).
• 2.a generation series: point 3 is added to the 1.a series (left inferior) and ten other signs are obtained (from the k to the tiny t).
• 3.a generation series: the point 6 is added to the 2nd series (right inferior) and ten other signs are obtained (from the u to the tiny z, as well as other letters).
• 4.a generation series: Point 6 is added to the 1.a series (right angler) and ten other signs are obtained.
• 5.a generation series: the signs of the 1.a series are moved down leaving the upper points (1 and 4) empty.
• 6.a generation series: points 1 and 2 are omitted; points 3, 4, 5 and 6 are combined.
• 7.a generation series: the points of the first column are omitted (points 1, 2 and 3) and the points are combined 4, 5 and 6.

The possible combinations are 2⁶, that is, 64. Since the 64th is the empty space, there are 63 useful combinations (5 series of 10 signs, one of 6 and another of 7) that are clearly insufficient to represent all human signography in any language, considering the various scientific and artistic notations. To multiply the possibilities, Braille devised special differentiating signs that, placed before another sign, make it a capital letter, italics, number or musical note. In Spanish braille, the codes for lowercase letters, most punctuation marks, some special characters, and some words are coded directly with a cell, but uppercase letters and numbers are represented by combining the letters with another previous symbol. All this requires its own didactics for its learning that considers the logic of sign design design, but also the characteristics of haptic perception that only a blind person like Braille could understand.

Spanish

Braille Generator Sign. Provision of points in two columns.

• 

  a, 1

• 

  b, 2

• 

  c, 3

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  d, 4

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  e, 5

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  f, 6

• 

  g, 7

• 

  h, 8

• 

  i, 9

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  j, 0

• 

  k

• 

  l

• 

  m

• 

  n

• 

  or

• 

  p

• 

  q

• 

  r

• 

  s

• 

  t

• 

  u

• 

  v

• 

  x

• 

  and

• 

  z

• 

  to

• 

  E

• 

  I

• 

  or

• 

  ?

• 

  ü

• 

  ñ

• 

  w

• 

  "

• 

  Point.

• 

  Numerical prefix

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  Mayuscula

• 

  Eat,

• 

  Question sign?

• 

  Point and coma;

• 

  Exclamation sign!

• 

  Comillas.

• 

  Opening brackets (

• 

  Closing brackets)

• 

  Guion -

• 

  Asterisco or Enfasis *

Example

• 

  Number sign.

• 

  Letra F.

These characters represent the number six, which is written like this “numeral prefix + f” which is equal to the number 6.

Size

Measures of the Braille Cell in Technical Document B 1. Dimensional parameters of the braille. Technical documents. Commission Braille Española (2014).

According to the Braille Related Technical Documents, the size of the braille cell is:

• Height: 6.2 to 7.1 mm.
• Width: 3.7 to 4.5 mm.
• Horizontal distance between the contiguous point centers of the same cell: from 2.4 to 2.75 mm.
• Vertical distance between the contiguous point centers of the same cell: from 2.4 to 2.75 mm.
• Point base diameter: between 1.2 and 1.9 mm.

Spanish braille alphabet in Unicode encoding

The Unicode standard encodes 8-dot braille patterns according to their binary appearance, rather than alphabetical order. Unicode defines the character block for braille patterns in the hexadecimal range between 2800 and 28FF.

Some of the 256 coded patterns are detailed below, along with their meaning in Spanish Braille. Note again that in Unicode there is no reference to the meaning of the encoded patterns.

Braille transcription

There are various methods of transcribing braille, known as "Grade 1", "Grade 2" and "Grade 3". Grade 1 braille is the most widely used transcription system and the only official method for publication in Spain, according to the agreement adopted by the Spanish Braille Commission. This transcription system replaces the ink notations (naming writing in visual alphabets on paper) of the original with the corresponding Braille ones. The transcription systems corresponding to Grades 2 and 3 are known as stenotypes. Its guiding principle is to save characters to save space, since characters in braille cannot be altered in size as in the case of ink.

All over the world there are centers for the adaptation of accessible books and documents for blind and severely visually impaired people. Among these centers, the NLS of the Library of Congress in the United States and the Adaptation Network of the ONCE Bibliographic Service stand out, the most dense in the world in its area, and which has two large offices in Madrid and Barcelona., five Didactic and Technological Resources Adaptation Services in their Educational Resource Centers (Madrid, Alicante, Seville, Pontevedra and Barcelona) and thirty-four Documentary Adaptation Units in Territorial Delegations, Area Directorates, Support Directorates and Physiotherapy School. ONCE also teaches reading and writing in this code and conducts training for Musical Signography, also called Braille Musicography.

Accessibility and braille system

An example of the accessibility of braille is found on current Canadian banknotes, which consist of a series of dots indicating their denomination and can be easily identified by people with visual impairments. This system is not based on the braille system, but was developed in collaboration with blind and visually impaired people, after a study indicated that not all users read braille. The Central Bank of Paraguay, since 2009, put into circulation a 2000 Guaraní bill with the Braille system for the blind.

In Spain, since the Andalusian General Elections and Regional Elections of March 2008, it is possible to use this system to vote autonomously and anonymously, which represents an important social advance for the integration of blind people and severely visually impaired.

Although braille was devised as the primary reading and writing system for blind people, in the UK it is estimated that only 15,000 to 20,000 out of two million people with vision problems use the system braille. Young people prefer electronic text as it is portable and allows them to communicate with their friends which has sparked a debate on how to make braille more attractive and how to get more teachers to be able to teach it.

The phone for the blind designed by Seonkeun Park was announced in 2009. This device has a keyboard and a touch screen with a series of dots that follow the braille reading and writing system.

In April 2020, Google's Android operating system introduced the TalkBack function, a new virtual braille keyboard that makes it easier for people with visual disabilities to write from the mobile screen.

Braille in other languages

There are multiple extensions of braille to include additional letters with diacritics, such as Ç, Ô, Å.

When braille is adapted for languages that do not use the Latin alphabet, the symbols of that alphabet are assigned according to how they would be transcribed in the Latin alphabet, regardless of alphabetical order. This is the case of Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and Chinese. In Greek, for example, gamma (γ) is written like the Latin letter g, even though its position is third in the alphabet (as is c in the Latin alphabet). The Hebrew letter bet (ב), the second in the alphabet and the one that corresponds to the Latin b, is nevertheless written v, since which is how it is usually pronounced. Russian tse (ц) is written as c, because that is commonly the letter for /ts/ in Slavic languages using the Latin script. In Arabic f is written as f, although historically it would be a p. In Chinese Braille, based on the zhuyin alphabet, there are additional symbols for sounds, diphthongs, and vowel-plus-final consonant combinations, in addition to Latin Braille symbols for initial consonants and single vowels; there are different systems depending on the variety of Chinese being considered.

The letter Ñ does not exist in French, and to represent it in Spanish the letter Ï is used (the vowel I with an umlaut of the French alphabet, which is not used in the Spanish language).

At least two adaptations of braille have had to completely reassign the sounds of the different symbols:

• The Japanese braille
• The Korean Braille

In Japanese braille, the alphabetic signs for a consonant and a vowel are combined into a single syllabic symbol. On the other hand, in Korean Braille the consonants have different shapes depending on whether they come at the beginning or end of the syllable. These modifications make braille much more compatible with Japanese and Korean, but mean that the Latin sounds cannot be maintained.