Braille T-shirts, and other dotty thoughts

[magid]

I now have this wonderfully purple T-shirt from the National Braille Press, which includes the letters NBP in "Braille," the dots without the texture. Which means that blind people can't read the T-shirt. Which naturally leads to ideas of how one would make a Braille T-shirt (stick-on jewels come to mind first, but that can't be the most elegant solution). And how most people are naturally b (especially women :-). Plus how odd it would be to have people read one's T-shirt by touch.

Other Braille thoughts: I wonder how (whether) they deal with all the different fonts in HP, like the handwriting ones. I'm so visually attuned that it's hard to think of reading without fonts, without italics, without boldface. There must be something, like HTML tags beginning and ending a section, but my brain is having a hard time wrapping around how I'd process that. Heck, I think I'd have a hard time reading Grade 1* Braille, because I don't spell as I read, I take in a word (or more) at a time, and I can't figure out how I'd do that by touch.

* In other words, ignoring all the other issues with abbreviations used in Grades 1.5 and 2**.
** Why isn't it Grades 2 and 3?

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

I probably would learn to feel patterns (assuming I'm not too old to learn it competently). Even so, I find it hard to imagine how my processing would have to change.

Oh, and the people I saw reading with two hands were reading two lines at a time, which made my brain whimper in different ways.

Grade distinctions: that makes sense. Or at least, it's understandable.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Also certain common words and phonemes have their own shortened Braille forms--not everything gets spelled out letter by letter.

Re fonts: I don't know exactly how they render the special fonts--it's probably a copyediting decision. I do know that when I read for them I'm asked to note bold and italics, so I assume they do have "tags" that indicate those. The impression I get is that there aren't special tags for something that would be a typeface distinction, but I do wonder if they sometimes might use bold or italics to offset extra-special stuff that was indicated with a different typeface in the print version.

(Or am I mixing up "typeface" and "font"--hmmm. I really should be more sure about that.)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I knew that there are shortened Braille forms for some words, but I didn't know about phonemes. Thanks. Do you know if they're used at all in Grade 1 Braille?

I can see having tags for italics and bold; how else to show the emphasis the author needed? I suspect that the whole question of font is not an issue, though. That is, an a is an a, and there's no alternate ways of showing that one dot.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Actually I think I used "phoneme" wrong. I was thinking more of a slightly larger unit, like, oh, syllable maybe.

I'm afraid I know nothing about the different Grades of Braille, except that the proofreading department has a couple of shelves worth of reference volumes for mathematical notation.

[magid.livejournal.com]

a couple of shelves worth of reference volumes for mathematical notation
Wow, that much? Though I suppose it makes sense, since it's the most complicated stuff they'd be setting as text.