{"id":2175,"date":"2009-01-05T18:59:29","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2175"},"modified":"2009-01-05T18:59:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:59:29","slug":"alternative_for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=2175","title":{"rendered":"Alternative Format"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Rankin<\/a>, the Scottish mystery author, is pushing to have more books published in Braille<\/a>. Incidentally, this week marks the 200th birthday of Braille’s inventor, Louis Braille.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-z5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}