I have always advocated 8 dot braille for advanced math. It is true that most
people cannot read 8 dot braille rapidly, but then, nobody reads math equations
rapidly. And the compactness of 8 dot braille is a real advantage.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Larry Skutchan
Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2015 2:38 PM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Re: Eight-dot braille
Thanks, we are going to print that slate.
With Whatever system a person who is blind communicates, it must contain both a
way to read and write. While eight dots might be more difficult for small
fingers, the tradeoff of limiting to just 64 characters makes the problem
tough. Even 256 might not be adequate. I suppose one could represent one
character with two eight dot cells and get enough, but that seems cumbersome.
Great discussion.
-----Original Message-----
From: liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:liblouis-liblouisxml-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Susan Jolly
Sent: Saturday, August 8, 2015 3:15 PM
To: liblouis-liblouisxml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [liblouis-liblouisxml] Eight-dot braille
From what I've read, eight-dot braille isn't suitable for small hands so isn't
a universal solution. Also, it exacerbates the problem of recognizing upper
and lower signs so you'd need rules about which cells could be adjacent to
which other ones so you could distinguish, say, a full six-dot cell from the
corresponding dot pattern dropped down a row.
Also, Unicode recognizes over 100,000 different characters and many more than
256 just for math.
However, people certainly can choose to use eight-dot braille if they wish.
By coincidence, just this spring a student at the University of Wisconsin,
Whitewater has made freely available the printer instruction file for creating
an 8-dot slate from 3-D printer. This slate has 4 lines of 16 cells each.
http://facstaff.uww.edu/sahyuns/3Dphys.php
Cheers,
SusanJ
For a description of the software, to download it and links to project pages go
to http://liblouis.org For a description of the software, to download it and
links to project pages go to http://liblouis.org
For a description of the software, to download it and links to
project pages go to http://liblouis.org
