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Published: January 4th 2017
Today is the first celebratory mash up of the year. World Braille Day commemorates and promotes the tactile reading and writing system.
My challenge today was to begin my learning of Braille. My mum has kindly lent me a small card she has with the basics of Braille on it. I ran my finger over the bumps just to get used to the feeling of it and have taken a sudden and irrational dislike to the letter 'W'. It feels horrible. Maybe the bumps are a little rougher or higher and so dig into the finger a little more. 'Y' also disturbs me.
I hope to be able to read bits of Braille by the end of the month... wish me luck!
Today is also Trivia Day. I love Trivia. Just little snippets of knowledge and crazy unbelievable things. To mash up the day I also had a look for little known facts about Braille.
Louis Braille began creating the writing system when he was 15. He became blind after his eyes were infected when he injured his eye with an awl. He was sent to the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris where he met
Playboy Braille
Because there are so many articles that would have otherwise been missed. Charles Barbier, who created sonography, a system of 12 raised dots to represent different sounds, for the French soldiers to communicate silently at night. It wasn't successful, but Barbier thought it might be useful for blind people. A 12 year old Braille pointed out the flaws and worked on simplifying the system to 6 dots.
Braille is a code, not a language, and so can be used by all languages.
There are 63 possible combinations of the 6-dot cells. Cells can represent a letter, number, punctuation, part of a word or a whole word.
Japanese beer cans have 'alcohol' written in Braille on the top of the can to prevent blind people from accidentally buying beer. There are also specific sections of sidewalks textured for blind people's canes so that they know where shops, subways, and crosswalks are located.
There are Playboy magazines printed in Braille. The American council of the Bind successfully sued the Library of Congress to make Playboy available in Braille!
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