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Speaking as someone who was born blind Braille may not be worth using if you went blind later in life. I was forced to use it heavily until about 10 or 11 in sp

by jareds 5y ago

Speaking as someone who was born blind Braille may not be worth using if you went blind later in life. I was forced to use it heavily until about 10 or 11 in spite of the fact that I wanted to use text to speech since it's quicker. It was totally worth it since it gave me a basic literacy foundation that enables me to type out sentences like these and be able to spell well enough that less then 1/5 of everything I type has to be corrected with Spellcheck. I have an 18-year-old braille display I got in school when I started programming more. It still works but I only use it once a month if that. I do everything with text to speech. The only time it was really useful was when I was doing assembly programming and had to look at hex values in a debugger. If you go blind later in life it may be pretty easy to avoid learning anything but enough braille to read signs for room numbers and bathrooms and do just fine.

Grustaf 5y ago
Wouldn't a large braille display be very useful for getting an overview of something? When consuming a big chunk of material, audio is very convenient, but being "linear" seems to make it quite impractical when you need to jump back and forth, or get an overview. I'm particularly bad at piecing together a larger context from smaller pieces, so maybe it's easier for others, especially if they are forced to?
- miki123211 5y ago
  Large Braille displays basically don't exist, they'd be too expensive. Navigation with a screen reader isn't just next item / previous item, though. There are hotkeys to jump between headings, links and so on. That's why good markup is so important for accessibility.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    No sure, I didn't mean that navigation itself was hard, more that it's hard to know where to navigate to. If you can see, you can quickly scan a page and get some sort of understanding of what is where, but at least with audio that's very hard. It seems that it should be possible to make cheap full screen braille displays, I suppose it's just that the volumes are not big enough to drive down prices.

by jareds 5y ago

Grustaf 5y ago

Wouldn't a large braille display be very useful for getting an overview of something? When consuming a big chunk of material, audio is very convenient, but being "linear" seems to make it quite impractical when you need to jump back and forth, or get an overview. I'm particularly bad at piecing together a larger context from smaller pieces, so maybe it's easier for others, especially if they are forced to?

miki123211 5y ago
Large Braille displays basically don't exist, they'd be too expensive. Navigation with a screen reader isn't just next item / previous item, though. There are hotkeys to jump between headings, links and so on. That's why good markup is so important for accessibility.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  No sure, I didn't mean that navigation itself was hard, more that it's hard to know where to navigate to. If you can see, you can quickly scan a page and get some sort of understanding of what is where, but at least with audio that's very hard. It seems that it should be possible to make cheap full screen braille displays, I suppose it's just that the volumes are not big enough to drive down prices.