How Braille Works

or been taken hostage. We take out to tell you I'm worried about, right, and hopefully what's happening is you guys are reading about this on our blog at how Stuff Works dot com Stuff you Should Know blog. Depending on our internet we are uploading daily post about our experience here. Either that or if what Chuck just said proved false, that means that we have spotty internet down in Guatemala and all of them will be uploaded the

following week after we get back. Right, that's it, okay, So look for those live now on the blogs that how stuff We're dot com or the week beginning the fifteen. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me is always a Charles W. Bryant, and guest producer Matt Frederick. Yeah, Matt is filling in for Jerry, who's sick right now because she's got the hepatitis. She doesn't really I got the hepatitis. Now you don't. What do you think they

injected us with? Uh? Folks, we got hepatitis shots by the way, because we are traveling to Central America, Guatemala, and they said that that's a good thing to get. And I don't know what they inject you with. They inject you within active hepatitis, so your body can form anybody. So when you get with the active one, it's like you can't stay here. C Jerry like got sick, and I was like, I feel good, I feel awful, my

arms hurt, I feel so or. I feel like I'm getting sick because I also got the the T DApp Yeah, the the technics dip theory. Yeah, And um, I don't feel very good right now, Chuck. Do you remember last year when I got sick for like eighteen straight weeks. That was fun. Well, I'm hoping to fight this one off. So we got Maddie in here. This is a pleasure matte of lines and scissors. Are you guys still together?

At one point the singer left and the guitar player left, and like Matt was left with a drum kit and like a part time keyboard player or something. You can make something these days with that. I think it's weeks later they decided they wanted to be in the band again, though, so I think they were like working on a reunion tour now. And it all began with a camping trip that one person wasn't invited to this historic So Matt, good to have you here, my friend. I concur Do

you have an intro? Or should we just say, let's talk about Braille. Let's talk about Brill. I do a little bit. You know much about Louis Braille. Yeah, sure. Louis Braille invented brail because he was a blind boy. You know how he got blind? He stuck something sharp in his eye. He did in all a w l yes, thank you. My thick tongue does not allow for distinction between all and all. He did that when he was

three years old. Yeah. His dad was a leather worker and he used the all, which is a basically a very sharp pointed instrument with a you could lobotomize somebody with it. It's a little big, but sure. He almost lobotomized himself with a gruesome lobotomy. He was screwed around with it and it slid out of his hand and

hit his eye right and then what he got infected? Yeah, he got infected and then he lost sight in his other eye because of sympathetic ophthalmia, which is when one eye says I that I's not gonna stick around, then I'm gonna go off the duty as well. Yeah, but that wasn't mentioned in this article. I thought that was surprising.

It is a bit surprising. Um. That reminds me of a King of the Hill where Um Hank Hill goes blind in one eye and then he goes blind in the other and Gary his mom's boyfriends, like, I've never heard of an eye sympathetically shutting down before. I was hoping you're gonna say it had something to do with con. No, I can't do a good con that was good. I gotta say it's con right, I'm a Oshan, and then you're supposed to say you're from the ocean. I can't do a good hand kill either of I don't watch

it anymore. Every singday brought Tom Petty on. I'm like this yeah as a character, yeah, or as Tom Petty as a character. Yeah, it's awful. I love Petty and I love King of the Hill. Do you love Tom Petty because he's great? I'm sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Um anyway, Wow, we already got off all right. Louis Brow was not wanting to be kept down despite an all sticking into his eye and going completely blind by age three. Right. Yeah.

He was inspired in fact, some years later when he was a teen by a visitor that came from the Royal Institution for Blind Youth, guy named Charles Barbier. Yeah. And this was in the early eighteen twenties or mid eighteen twenties, depending on who you ask. Late eighteen twenties. Other sources say early. Another issue with this article, uh, and he and this guy Barbia had invented a code called uh night riding to allow soldiers to communicate to each other in the dark. And this is not to

be confused with night rider or night swimming. No, um, is it not night rider? I thought it was night rider. Night rider. I thought he invented the car. No, he invented night writing, totally different, and that did not catch on an army right right, So he he went to the School for the Blind where Louis Braille was twelve. When Barbier visited, I guess and boom, yeah, smart little kid says I can use this. He yeah, and he could.

And actually within three years he had worked out the kinks. UM. He basically optimized night writing UH, and UM created his own system, which we know and love now is Brail at age fifteen. By age twenty, he prints. He published

his first book in Brail Awesome. It was probably large and bulky, but strangely enough, Brail didn't catch on UH globally or even UM in France UH until after he died, right, And even then it was popular with the Institute UH for Blind Youth, but it still wasn't like super widespread because and this is something I didn't know. This is sort of like the Totem podcast. There's all these little tidbits I never knew. Ah, there were competing codes, and

different inventors came up with different code. So clearly, when there's different systems out there, it's going to be hard to decide which one to use, and hard for one to become widespread. So that's one reason. Did you know there's no universal sign language. I believe it didn't know that. Yeah, one of the competing UM. I guess. A tactile alphabet is what you call these things in general. UM. It was created by a guy named Valentine. How we Yeah,

I don't even know. You shouldn't even try h a u um out why it's not uter now it's um aout okay. UM. He created a system that is basically kind of wavy uh Latin characters, but it looked very much like the characters that we use here in the West, but they were a little waverer, a little more elongated, I guess, ostensibly so that you could feel them more easily. And still to this day some people UM considered this type of tactile writing UM easier to learn. Very good point. Thanks.

The thing is Brail eventually did catch on, chuck and um. These days, Louis Brail is looked upon in much the same way that UM. Uh. Johann Guttenberg is Yeah, sure, I think actually UM. Helen Keller on the anniversary anniversary of Louis Brail's death said something along the lines of um, in our small way, we the Blinder is indebted to

Louis Braila's mankind is the Gutenberg. Sure, he basically took a group of humans who were virtually unrecognized in the educational system and gave them a way to become educated people. Literate created literacy, both of them, Yeah, among the blind, and they both took a little while to catch on, largely because, um. What one of the reasons we said with the Brail is because they were competing codes. But they're also the books. Brail books were really bulky and large.

Still are, well, they still are, but back then, dude, it was even worse. Like you didn't want to be lugging around Brail books in your rucksack. No. And Tracy, who wrote this article, um, is a huge Harry Potter fan. So she described how big Harry Potter and what the half Blood something else something I don't know whatever, Harry floodprints. They go that Harry Potter book is fourteen volumes long, and its Brail edition that's long. Yeah. Uh, and yet

they're heavy. They have to be um published uh using a loof loose leaf so that the with a with a ring binder in the middle so that the pages can sit flat, so you can hit the cells all the way. And I think, actually, Chuck, we may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. Let's talk about Brail at its basis, like what it is literally, Yes, well, Josh Louis Brail realized that the night writing method used cells to create an alphabet using dots and dashes. Yeah,

and originally Brail us dashes as well. Does not anymore. No, but the Brail cells today, they they're a little bit different than um, the original Brail. They do not use dashes. Like you said, there are two dots wide and three dots tall. At this point, I w everybody who's listening to this podcast to close your eyes. Okay, okay, you have in your head a cell made up of six dots. Like Chuck just said, it's two dots across and three

dots down in each of the columns. Right, so you have one to three dots down, and to the next column to the right, you have one to three dots down. Now, if you go to the first dot on the first column, which would be the one on the left hand side, that's that's the number one dot, the one below that is two, and then three. At the top of the right hand um line of dots you have four and

then five and then six. Using these six dots, you can create sixty three character combinations, correct, Josh, And you would think pretty easy because we've only got twenty six letters in our alphabet. But they also have to cover punctuation, contractions, um, musical notes, and symbols, basically anything you can think of. The it you would be able to read with your eyes. It needs to be accounted for within those Brail dots, right, and there are some in the original Brail, the English

Brail alphabet. There Um, there is some punctuation included. Like uh, close your eyes again, everybody. Uh, go back to the brail cell and think of it like a domino. That's a rectangle with the dots inside. A dot in position to alone is a comma. So remember that's the middle one and the left hand column. Uh one, that is the imposition six alone is the capital sign. Right, So you put that before the next character and you know

that it's the it's a capital letter. Yeah. Um, And it just kind of goes on like this, right, And you also have to represent the numbers two we we forgot to add. So zero through nine are represented and you can obviously make up any combination with those, and you zero through nine are actually the same thing as letters A through J, but before each number you would have a number sign, which like you have a capital sign before the next letter to indicate that it's the number.

So the number sign is the letter or the third position, and then four or five and six, and then you might have a B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I or J, and then that would be a number instead of a letter. It sounds so complicated. It does, But I imagine if you are, UM looking at a book for the first time. I don't remember back that far, but if you're looking at a normal book, UM, you're probably like, I couldn't think of anything more complicated than I have to do exact And that's that's the point.

I'm glad you brought that up, because they say that it is very much like learning to read and write for the first time, UM, using the same pathways in the brain. And should we talk about the Wonder machine real quick since I brought that up. Yeah, this is really interesting. Yes, the fm R I when they people read Brail their visual cortex. Visual cortex actually fires up. Yeah,

And there's a couple of theories why. The first is that when you are line, do you have this uh basically this storage area that is put to use doing other stuff. Pretty cool, right, uh, which would be tactile sensory input rather than visual sensory input. Uh. And then the other theory, Chuck, is that the language processing centers actually serve as holding areas for this tactile information. So cool. Yeah, But because it's the brain, we really have no clue.

We just don't know when it's firing up and when it's not. I've lost a tremendous amount of faith in the wonder machine, dude. Yeah. I read the study where this guy um scanned a dead salmon while he showed it pictures of humans and asked them what emotions it was showing. Any got a response on the m R I Yeah, that's disappointing. Yeah, it is so moving on, Josh. A typical line of brail is about forty characters, and a typical page of brails about lines, right, So think

about that that domino. Each domino is a character, and in uncontracted brail or grade one brail every word is spelled out letter by letter, which is why the Harry Potter book is fourteen volumes long. Yeah, exactly right. So to combat against this huge bulky nous, they've come up with contracted brail Grade two brail. And this is when they group or or they contract braille literally using representations of whole words or letter combinations sort of like shorthand. Yeah,

like ing or ed or the or. And they have their own, um rather than three cells for and you just have one in its and right. But there's a little controversy. There's always some people say that uncontracted brail is really important because it's a foundation for learning contracted brail, and opponents say that uncontracted rail is uh, time and space consuming and basically you just don't need to learn

two codes. So why bother? That's a good question. I guess a good answer would be that, um, what is the standard? What are you gonna encounter? Contracted or uncontracted? When you're at the A T M machine, Uh, and you're you're you're reading the keys, is that contracted or uncontracted? I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly, Uh, it's uncontracted it because yeah, there's one dot at the number one position,

et cetera. I can read that kind of brail. Well. Yeah, and actually when there's a great illustration showing basic English the English brail alphabet, and um, it seems like something you could pick up if you really set your mind to it would be kind of cool. Should we talk more about? Uh? You you how you read it? Like you read it from left or right like a regular book, but you write it right to left? Is that correct? Yeah?

You have to you when you make the impression on the page, you have to do it going from right to left because think about it, you're going to be flipping the page over to read the bomb. Pretty interesting. Interesting, And you can do this handheld still with a stylist. Yes, some books are translated from site books to brail hand by hand, which takes hundreds of hours, but that's not the way to do it anymore. I mean you can,

but there's different ways. Um. Now, you can get a brail writer which has a key for each of the six dots, so the cell, which makes sense, makes sense. You can actually get a regular quarty keyboard attached to

a brail printer, very easy to use. And um, what else, Josh well, if you want to read in the future right now, there's movable UM type that reads a screen line by line, and UM there's you have basically like a pad that has a recessed pins that represent a dot, and then based on what the line of text on the screen says, the corresponding dots pop up and you read them, and then as it goes down, they refresh and then pop up again. It's very motorized. It's very cool.

I actually read UM an article about a NASA science hist who's figured out how to use UM. I think they're called like active polymers artificial muscles, basically to create a very highly compressed, movable type brail keyboard. So you could apply it to the iPhone or whatever. It looks like the future of it. That's pretty cool. Uh. And then there obviously, if you want to skirt around all

the brail. Blind people use things like screen readers for their computer, to audio books obviously, and recordings of lecturers or friends and family letters from their friends and family. But I don't know if you remember, we did something on the webcast on a blind man being blind in Modern society and the New York Times, and this guy

was very anti all these readers. He said, it basically makes blind people lazy, and they need to get out and and learn Brail, just as you need to go out and learn how to read, because you get a better understanding of a word if you understand how to spell it and write it and read it. And plus also it's you know, you use a different part of your brain to process language orally than you do visually

or um tactically. Yeah, so I mean there's like a whole part of your brain that would be underdeveloped, and that just in and of itself is a bad idea, I would think. So. Um. They also have you can scan books now too. That's one of the easier ways to translate now using um optical character recognition technology, and you can scan a book and they can translate it into Brail for you. They well, you can send it

to a brail printer. Well. Um, you can understand though why somebody who is blind would want to, you know, listen to an audio book. It is faster, apparently. Um. The average Brail reader can read at a rate of one to two hundred words per minute. By contrast, the average cited eighth grader can read about two hundred and five words per minute, and college students read about two d and eighty words per minute. So if you're in college and you're blind, it's probably not a necessarily a

question of laziness. It's a question of just trying to keep up. You know, I'm a slow reader. What about you? Very slow? Are you interesting? I am too. Like when I read a book, I'm a I call it deliberate because yeah, I say you read slow, but I read very deliberately, and I'll reread a sentence to get it just right. I'm not a scanner at all. No, I'm not either, And I say scanner stink. I do too, Chuck.

These people that I see reading like you take these tests where you read see how fast you can read reading comprehension. And I've done this on like people's blogs, and people logged on and said they read this many words and I literally didn't my eyes and time myself, and it's I can't even scan that fast. I don't see how they can be absorbing these words, so they're probably not. It's all just sitting there and working memory for a minute and then it's gone. I ingested, buddy,

I do too, like a pie. Like pie or like a pie, like a whole pie. I thought you meant like pie, so chuck. Um. Still, like we said, there's all over the place many languages of Brail specific to that country. Yeah. Again, there's no universal Brail. There's not even a universal English Brail. The Brail in the UK and Wales and the United States are all different. Well, yeah, they're different codes. And luckily we have the the Brail Authority of North America here in the us of A.

And they do publish standards for these codes. But you have to know what code you're reading, because the same cell can mean one thing in one code and something else in a different code. Right. And um, Also there's notations. There's Brail for music. English Brail American edition is used for things like novels and magazines, basically literature. Right. Then you have the nemic code of Brail mathematics and scientific notation for math and science because I mean, think about sigma.

There's nothing in the English alphabet that that signifies sigma. And that thing pops up a lot and terrifies me whenever I see it in an equation. Me too. Uh. Then you've computer Brail code uh code for ASKEI A S C, I, A, K A, t um and chemical notations and music right right, So you the the whole point of these um standard authorities is to bring all

this together so that they're uncited. People in their country can all know what the hell they're reading, right, and they're like we said, every country literally has their own brail, which there's even Chinese Brail with the characters representing sounds that make up the language. Hebrew brailed Josh as well, which sounds like the grade one brail, with each letter and number representing its own cell. And then, of course, Chuck,

there's the newest Braille alphabet, which is Tibetan. Welcome Tibetan Brail to the family. A a woman named Sebrie ten Berkin created the code so that she could read Tobetan manuscripts, and she realized that she had just created a new Brail language and took it to to Tibet and started teaching blind Tibetan children. That's Tibetan Brail. So you could literally invent a brail method if you wanted to. Oh, I have really Josh Braille. Yeah uh, And you know

they're still working on this. Many countries have agencies and departments that evaluate their own codes and try and uh institute or implement new improvements in technology. That kind of thing like this one I saw. I don't understand that the benefit here. So there's a new display prototype that can be rolled up like paper. Yeah, uh do people do we still do scrolls? Who does that? I think

that's on its way out with the refreshable type. Aside from your like diploma and what what else poster of you know, anything that has to do with papyrus, it's generally scrolled, you know, silk, that kind of thing. I guess that's a good thing. And then well, uh well sorry, Brail libraries web, Brail libraries available online. So it seems like brail is everywhere, right, sure, I'll tell you one place. It's not in the United States. Oh no, it's just

the fact of the day. Our currency chuck. Out. Of one hundred and eighty countries in the world that use paper currency, the United States is the only one that makes its paper currency the same size and the same shape, regardless of denomination. If you are blind, you have to come up with your own clever tricks to keep track of it. And you're although it probably rarely happens. You're constantly under throat of being ripped off because you have no idea. You just know you have a paper bill.

It could be a one or a hundred. You have no clue. They fold the paper the bills. Isn't that one of the tricks? That is one trick. And there's a big debate even within UM blind uh blind advocacy groups of whether or not the U s should go to the trouble of putting any kind of tactile imprint on their currency or should blind people just make do you know, uh, but I'm getting you a gift, Chuck what.

I went onto Amazon and I found this thing called the pocket brailer, okay, and it hooks on your key chain and it has UM one, two, three, four, five, has six little UM notches and you put the corner of your paper currency into the appropriate notch. So if it's the one, you put it in the one notch and you press down and you can actually emboss you

can brail uh your currency. That's a great idea, not for yourself, but if a blind person ever comes in contact with it, they have it already brailed for him. So if everyone got these and did this to their the dollars that flow their way. Eventually we could have enough money out there that we're where we've done it ourselves. Yeah, I mean think about it. Just every time you came in contact with a piece of paper currency, you marked

it forgot about it, got back into circulation. That kind of gets around, you know what I say to that? What So I'm going onto Amazon. It's actually from a site called maxie Aid, which is a very unfore name for a website, but they sell the pocket brailer for six dollars and seventy nine cents. And I'm getting you one, buddy. Really, I'm getting myself one. Two. That's pretty cool, all right. Well, if everyone else out there god him, then maybe we

could make a real difference in this world. I agree, of course, that the blind people would have to know that this movement is going on, not necessarily I think the trust that they were marked correctly. Well, that's kind of thing. I mean, I'm sure there's a jerk out there who will do it the opposite way that Chris

is going to hell anyway. So yeah, good point. Yeah, threefold, remember the which is rule of three right, come back in your head three times, buddy, If you want to read more about rail Um, you can type that ord b R A, I L L E into the handy search bar at how stuff works dot com, which leads us, of course to listener mail. Ye yes, Josh. Anyone out there who listens to this much of the show and listens to listener mail, all eight of you know two things.

We love email from our young friends, Yes, and we love email in broken English, and we love free stuff. And this is both actually not all three. This is not free stuff. This is I'm gonna call this broken English from Young Lucy. Ah, Young Lucy. What is called the cutest recent immigrant in the United States is great and of course, as we always like to see O A and say, we're not making fun of anyone. This is doing a great job of writing in English, and

we just think it's a good time. Hello Josh and Chuck from the podcast. I am fourteen years of age and I enjoy to listen to the podcast plenty good start. I write this on friends email due to the fact that I myself do not have email. I write another before, but is not certain if it arrived to the dwelling of you, so I write again. I love the podcast and the joke you say, make eye laughing so hard. That's good. So she thinks you're funny. I try hard

on English, but it's still no good. Josh and Chuck helped plenty, and I find I learned new thing every one of the days. Awesome. So she's learning things all the time from us. She should her parents should probably be afraid. Probably so. I come to Canada from China and like to live here. Every day here is joyous, and all people are happy and also kind. That's about Canada.

She must mean Vancouver. My mother jokes that I am too much in interest with podcasts and says she is wondering if I am in love with podcast Josh m M. I respond with wholehearted no, and declare him too married and he much too old for my young and small age fourteen. Very true. That is a good girl. Josh is not married, though, we should say. I listened to old podcast with Chris, and I'm wondered, why, oh why Chris does Josh work? Is Chris slave? Slavery not accepted

in Canada, neither should in US? Agreed? Agreed. I love to hear you, and good day to you. I try hard to write this and I'm hoping happiness and health for you from your fan number one, Lucy. Goodbye, no use slave. Okay, Lucy, I am not married. I am very much taken, but I gotta tell yet. If I weren't, I would wait for you. You sound like a very she is quite a charmer, passionate, charming and lady. And welcome to Canada. But can I speak for Canadians? I

guess welcome to Canada. We do here in the US anyway, And thanks for listening, Lucy. It's really very, very cute. So if you have a super heartbreakingly cute email that you want to send us, you know we like those a lot. We're suckers for him. You just wrap it up, send it along to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it house to works dot com. Want more house stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff

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