Show HN: Ever wanted to look at yourself in Braille?
github.com17 points by cat-whisperer 5 days ago
17 points by cat-whisperer 5 days ago
This does not look like Braille to me. Braille is a system that uses cells composed of six (or eight) dots. This is just dots strewn all over the place.
Reminds me of this relatively new device in the space though: https://store.humanware.com/hca/monarch-the-1st-dynamic-tact...
Are there blind users of hackernews here that could answer to the probably stupid question:
Would you be able to "perceive" a picture if that picture was engraved on a surface ?
Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are, but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings, where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.
A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created his system to replace an older one where they would teach people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was never meant to be used for something like a picture.
I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models they use.
[0]: https://evengrounds.com/services/tactile-3d-printed-models-f...
Sometimes I draw UML-like diagrams when I join a project (and when the project is big enough in such a way my mind melts if I try to keep track of everything), I wonder if there are equivalent representations of such things.
Linear text is perfect to me for documentation, teaching/learning etc...
But also, systems seems to be better digested under the shape of spatial representations (I met a lot of CS persons that fantasized over the possibility of displaying all the files of your codebase in a VR-like environment augmented with visual cues (UML) and I must admit that I would find this unnecessary but comfortable -- and I can imagine applications of this in other domains; imagine a teacher arranging the whole of Kant philosophy as a spatial-visual system referencing positions, comments, etc..). Eyes are cool because you can focus on something while knowing that some available information is there around the zone you are focusing; in a sense, so is the hand, locally, but I imagine (I dont know) it would require some super-human level of braille reading to be able to jump back and forth reading on different fingers, so that's again a probably stupid question to ask to the blind crowd of hn : are you able to do this?
stupid. maybe post something you actually made instead of telling a computer to make.
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