Ian Rankin, the Scottish mystery author, is pushing to have more books published in Braille. Incidentally, this week marks the 200th birthday of Braille’s inventor, Louis Braille.
It’s great that high-profile authors like Rankin are bringing attention to the woeful shortage of books printed in Braille, but I wonder if the format will still exist in a couple decades. With a few more interface tweaks, devices like the Kindle could read text to the user at any desired speed. Smartphones could also be modified to the task, when they aren’t reading street signs or serving as GPS locators. I could be missing something, but Braille doesn’t have a whole cultural milieu built around it, as we see with American Sign Language. Braille exists as a purely written form of communication developed within the confines of 19th-century technology. Once technology makes print universally accessible via optical character recognition and speech output, will Braille still have a following? We should also ask where the deafblind community stands on this.
Here’s my thought:
When given the choice between a paper and print book and an audio book, I choose the printed version. I generally prefer the experience of reading to listening, even though it doesn’t allow me to multitask. I can pause and reread, flip back to something earler. It’s a different experience, admitedly visual.
Though I’ve never learned braille, I image that reading braille would resemble reading printed text more closely than it would hearing audio. It includes the beauty of voices and sounds being generated within one’s imagination.
I am curious to hear the blind perspective.
And my thought was how strange and awkward it must feel to study, to read at university, on texts hat are read out aloud to you.
I myself always felt the urge to make coloured markings here and there where something important struck me in the pages.
There’s no reason that optical character recognition technologies need to be combined only with auditory output mechanisms. So even with regard to the deafblind, your concluding point may stand — it may be that character recognition technology in combination with refreshable Braille displays (which are also becoming better and less expensive), or even personal Braille printers, will largely take the place of mass-printed Braille texts. I suspect that whether speech or Braille is the better means of delivering a text to a given individual, universal access to the means of translation is as important a goal as is the increased mass-production of texts in any given form.
Indeed, maybe “translation” is the wrong paradigm — with content that is distributed in electronic form, the means of rendering and display (visual, auditory, or tactile; on an electronic display or on paper; and so on) can and perhaps should be entirely user-determined. There’s no need to privilege the ink-on-paper form even as a starting point — if a book’s simply a binary file at the point of distribution, my system can be set up to download it and print it to paper, but other people’s could render it just as directly to Braille (whether on paper or on a refreshable display), to speech, to a visual display on a screen — or to a combination of any of these for those who need multi-sensory input to “read” a text. Or indeed, to any other form that might be identified as useful to any given person.