HN Reader

In case you think Braille is old tech from the paper books era, you should check out a modern refreshable Braille display connected to smartphone or laptop. They're feats of engineering that work hand in hand with screen readers to make content readable to blind and low vision people, and others who use them. The screen reader gets its data from the OS and apps and outputs that as either audio announcements, speech, or as Braille for a refreshable display. Single line displays are often 40 to 80 cells wide, each cell a little set of servo-controlled pins that pop up and down to form the Braille characters, but popular displays can also be had as short as 12 characters and others are multi-line slabs. Braille reading is a super power and more people should learn.

Tangentially related, but I built a Chrome/Firefox extension a while back that converts random words on a webpage as you browse into braille, ASL, Kana, etc.

So if you're ever interested in practicing Grade I Braille in the most functionally useless fashion (by reading it visually) feel free to check it out.

It's also completely open-source.

https://mordenstar.com/projects/glyphshift

https://github.com/scpedicini/glyph-shift

I've encountered grade2 in UK museums and as someone not native and not trained on it, reading the braille is an exercise in cryptography. At least it saves lots of paper.

> English Braille [...] consists of around 250 letters

That is fascinating! I always assumed it had the same number of letters as normal written English.

What are some good resources for learning braille?