Braille
Braille ( , ) is a Tactile alphabet, tactile writing system used by blindness, blind or visually impaired people. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone devices. Braille can be written using a slate and stylus, a braille writer, an electronic braille notetaker or with the use of a computer connected to a braille embosser. For blind readers, braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed the braille code based on the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first Binary numeral system, binary form of writing developed in the modern era. Braille characters are f ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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English Braille
English Braille, also known as ''Grade 2 Braille'', is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters ( phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as , correspond to more than one letter in print. There are three levels of complexity in English Braille. Grade 1 is a nearly one-to-one transcription of printed English and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places (such as the letter ) and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions. Both Grade 1 and Grade 2 have been standardized. "Grade 3" is any of various personal shorthands that are almost never found in publications. Most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade 2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade 2 Braille. Some of the differences with Unified English Brai ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Braille Writer
Braille ( , ) is a tactile writing system used by blind or visually impaired people. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone devices. Braille can be written using a slate and stylus, a braille writer, an electronic braille notetaker or with the use of a computer connected to a braille embosser. For blind readers, braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed the braille code based on the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing. He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era. Braille characters are formed using a combination of six raised do ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Louis Braille
Louis Braille ( ; ; 4 January 1809 – 6 January 1852) was a French educator and the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day. Braille was blinded in one eye at the age of three. This occurred as a result from an accident with a stitching awl in his father's harness making shop. Consequently, an infection set in and spread to both eyes, resulting in total blindness. At that time, there were not many resources in place for the blind, but he nevertheless excelled in his education and received a scholarship to France's Royal Institute for Blind Youth. While still a student there, he began developing a system of tactile code that could allow blind people to read and write quickly and efficiently. Inspired by a system invented by Charles Barbier, Braille's new method was more compact and lent itself to a range of uses, including music. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Unified English Braille
Unified English Braille Code (UEBC, formerly UBC, now usually simply UEB) is an English language Braille code standard, developed to encompass the wide variety of literary and technical material in use in the English-speaking world today, in uniform fashion. Background Standard 6-dot braille only provides 63 distinct characters (not including the space character), and thus, over the years a number of distinct rule-sets have been developed to represent literary text, mathematics, scientific material, computer software, the @ symbol used in email addresses, and other varieties of written material. Different countries also used differing encodings at various times: during the 1800s American Braille competed with English Braille and New York Point in the ''War of the Dots''. As a result of the expanding need to represent technical symbolism, and divergence during the past 100 years across countries, braille users who desired to read or write a large range of material have needed ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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1829 Braille
Louis Braille's original publication, ''Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots'' (1829), credits Barbier's night writing as being the basis for the braille script. It differed in a fundamental way from modern braille: It contained nine decades (series) of characters rather than the modern five, utilizing dashes as well as dots. Braille recognized, however, that the dashes were problematic, being difficult to distinguish from the dots in practice, and those characters were abandoned in the second edition of the book. The first four decades indicated the 40 letters of the alphabet (39 letters of the French alphabet, plus English ''w''); the fifth the digits; the sixth punctuation; and the seventh and part of the eighth mathematical symbols. The seventh decade was also used for musical notes. Most of the remaining characters were unassigned. Script As in modern braille, most of the higher decades were derived from the first: *Decades 1–4 were the same as tod ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Braille Notetaker
The Perkins Brailler is a "braille typewriter" with a key corresponding to each of the six dots of the braille code, a space key, a backspace key, and a line space key. Like a manual typewriter, it has two side knobs to advance paper through the machine and a carriage return lever above the keys. The rollers that hold and advance the paper have grooves designed to avoid crushing the raised dots the brailler creates. Although braille notation was designed for people who are blind or visually impaired to read, prior to the introduction of the Perkins Brailler, writing braille was a cumbersome process. Braille writers created braille characters with a stylus and slate (as developed by Louis Braille) or by using one of the complex, expensive, and fragile braille writing machines available at the time. History The first Braille writer machine was presented by Frank Haven Hall in 1892. The original Perkins Brailler was produced in 1951 by David Abraham (1896–1978), a woodworki ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Slate And Stylus
The slate and stylus are tools used by blind people to write text that they can read without assistance.Alpha Chi Omega (1908) Invented by Charles Barbier as the tool for writing letters that could be read by touch, the slate and stylus allow for a quick, easy, convenient and constant method of making embossed printing for Braille character encoding. Prior methods of making raised printing for the blind required a movable type printing press. Design The basic design of the slate consists of two pieces of metal, plastic, or wood fastened together with a hinge at one side.Harry Houdini Collection (1888) The back part of the slate is solid with slight depressions spaced in braille cells of six dots each. The depressions are approximately deep and about in diameter. The horizontal and vertical spacing between dots within a cell is approximately , while the distance between adjacent cells is about . The front of the slate consists of rectangular windows that fit over the bra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Charles Barbier
Charles Barbier de la Serre (; 18 May 1767 – 22 April 1841) was the French inventor of several forms of shorthand and alternative means of writing, one of which became the inspiration for Braille. Barbier was born in Valenciennes and served in the French artillery from 1784 to 1792. He left France during the Revolution and lived for several years in the United States, returning to France during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. He did not rejoin the military. Barbier was interested in shorthand Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to Cursive, longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Gr ... and other alternative writing forms. In 1815, he published a book titled, ''Essai sur divers procédés d'expéditive française''. In this book, Barbier explains that conventional writing is a barrier to universal literacy because it take ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New York Point
New York Point (New York Point: ) is a braille-like system of tactile writing for the blind invented by William Bell Wait (1839–1916), a teacher in the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. The system used one to four pairs of points set side by side, each containing one or two dots. (Letters of one through four pairs, each with two dots, would be .) The most common letters are written with the fewest points, a strategy also employed by the competing American Braille. Capital letters were cumbersome in New York Point, each being four dots wide, and so were not generally used. Likewise, the four-dot-wide hyphen and apostrophe were generally omitted. When capitals, hyphens, or apostrophes were used, they sometimes caused legibility problems, and a separate capital sign was never agreed upon. According to Helen Keller, this caused literacy problems among blind children, and was one of the chief arguments against New York Point and in favor of one of the braill ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Braille Embosser
A braille embosser is an impact printer that renders text as tactile braille cells. Using braille translation software, a document or digital text can be embossed with relative ease. This makes braille production efficient and cost-effective. Braille translation software may be free and open-sourced or paid. Braille embossers can emboss single-sided or double-sided (called interpoint) and can produce 6- or 8-dot braille. Blind users tend to call other printers "ink printers," to distinguish them from their braille counterparts. This is often the case regardless of the type of printer being discussed (e.g., thermal printers being called "ink printers" even though they use no ink). As with ink printers and presses, embossers range from those intended for consumers to those used by large publishers. The price of embossers increase with the volume of braille it produces . Types The fastest industrial braille embosser is probably the $92,000 Belgian-made NV Interpoint 55, fi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Night Writing
Night writing is the name given to a form of tactile writing invented by Charles Barbier de la Serre (1767–1841). It is one of a dozen forms of alternative writing presented in a book published in 1815: ''Essai sur divers procédés d'expéditive française, contenant douze écritures différentes, avec une planche pour chaque procédé'' (Essay on various processes of French expedition, containing twelve different writings, with a plate for each process). The term (in French: ''écriture nocturne'') does not appear in the book, but was later applied to the method shown on Plate VII of that book. This method of writing with raised dots that could be read by touch was adopted at the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles (Royal Institution for Blind Youth) in Paris. A student at the school, Louis Braille, used the tools and Barbier's idea of communicating with raised dots in a form of code, and developed a more compact and flexible system for communications, Braille. Origin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |