Being Blind
Akshay Shah
Being Blind
Akshay Shah
Contents Braille and the Nemeth Code
Introduction 1.1 | What Is Blindness?
3
1.2 | Challanges Faced by the Blind
9
2.1 | History of Braille
13
2.2 | Structure of Braille
17
2.3 | Braille and Languages
25
2.4 | The Nemeth Code
61
Acknowledgements Acknowledgements
Defeating Blindness 3.1 | The Dot Smartwatch
71
3.2 | The Braille Reader: A Concept
80
3.3 | Be My Eyes: App
81
85
Introduction
3 1.1 | What Is Blindness? 9 1.2 | Challanges Faced by the Blind
1
Introduction
T
he majority of artwork has been remained disregarded, due
to the main reason that they are visual. It is especially difficult to represent artwork that is placed down on flat surfaces, intricacies that make artwork what they truly are. This results in the world being perceived differently by a visually enhanced individual than that from a blind one. This makes it difficult for the non-impaired to understand what issues that are faced in everyday life. It was estimated by the World Health Organisation that there are around 258 million people in the world to be visually impaired: 39 million being blind and 246 million having low vision. Looking at these staggering results, the awareness about blindness is very limited. Given this, the aim of this book is to understand how graphical representations are perceived by the blind and visually enhanced individuals and also the issues that are faced by the blind by the visually impaired, by giving them the experience of the “blind�.
2
1.1 | What Is Blindness? Blindness has a wide array of conditions ranging from a limited ability to see objects with special aids to the absence of light perception. Being legally blind on the other hand, is defined as no better than 20/200 corrected vision in the better eye, or a visual field not extending beyond 20 degreed in the better eye, or a visual efficiency of no more than 20%. The “legal� refers to a determination of the person’s eligibility for government benefits resulting from his or her visual impairment.
It is important to note that there is a differance between being visually impaired and legally blind. Being visually impaired means that your vision is either affected by visual problems such as having no peripheral vision, having very low eyesight while it is superior to 5% or having problems seeing in certain areas of your vision such as in front, in spots, not seeing in 3-D or in colour.
Being legally blind refers to a complete lack of functional vision it involves varying levels of vision ability, under varying conditions and occurs when an inadequate amount of light hits the retina, or information has not been delivered to the brain correctly. Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness. 3
Complete Blindness
This is characterized by a complete and total loss of vision. Having a visual acuity of 20/200 means that someone with normal vision can see an object at 200 feet, and a person with impaired vision can see at a distance no further than 20 feet. Several different diseases can cause complete blindness; some develop later in life and some are present at birth.
The leading cause of blindness include age-related macular degeneration, which the National Eye Institute calls the most common cause of blindness in adults who are 60 or older; cataracts, which obstructs light from hitting the retina because of opaque patches on a lens; and glaucoma, which causes blindness due to damage to the optic nerve.
4
1.1 | What Is Blindness?
Colour Blindness Also called dyschromatopsia, people who have colour blindness are unable to distinguish certain colours. This type of blindness more commonly affects men than women. The most common form of colour blindness is red-green colour blindness, which makes it difficult to distinguish certain shades of red and green.
There are many tests available to measure colour vision defects but the most common is the Ishihara Plate test. Ishihara plates were developed by Dr. Shinobu Ishihara for the Japanese army.
Consiting of 38 plates of circles created by irregular coloured dots in two or more colours. The plates will be put in front of you and you will be asked what number you can see on the plate. Some plates contain information which people with normal colour vision can see others contain information that only people with colour blindness can see. If you make a certain amount of errors you will be diagnosed with colour blindness. An example of Ishihara plates and what they mean are shown on the next page. 5
Ishihara Plate No. 1 (12)
Ishihara Plate No. 9 (74)
Ishihara Plate No. 19 (Nothing: A hidden digit plate; Red-Green colourmdeficiency people see the number 2).
Ishihara Plate No. 23 (42)
6
7
8
1.2 | Challenges Faced by the Blind Blind people face challenges that the sighted do not have to overcome, and are often limited in their ability to live life. Knowing the challenges blindness creates may help sighted people understand what blind people face each day.
Technological Technology poses a challenge for blind people, for example, a blind person cannot read information on a web page. Searching the internet requires screen reading software will read the information on a website. People who have limited vision may have difficulty with viewing websites as well, particularly the small fonts, icons and screen colors used by many sites. 9
Environmental People with complete blindness or low vision often have a difficult time self-navigating outside well-known environments. Traveling or simply walking down a crowded street may pose great difficulty. In addition, blind people must learn every detail about the home environment.
Social Blindness causes considerable social challenges, blindness affects a person’s ability to perform many job duties. It may also cause difficulties with participating in activities outside of a workplace, such as sports and academics. Many of these social challenges limit a blind person’s ability to meet people adding to low self esteem. 10
Braille and The Nemeth Code
13 2.1 | History of Braille 17 2.2 | Structure of Braille 25 2.3 | Braille and Languages 61 2.4 | The Nemeth Code
11
12
2.1 | History of Braille
Braille is widely used as system of writing and reading by the visually impaired. This system was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille. The structure is made up of 6 raised dots in a Braille cell. The raised-dot patterns created are read using the fingertip. It also includes symbols to represent punctuation, mathematics and scientific characters, music, computer notation and foreign languages.
1260 The history of Braille can be traced from early eleventh century when King Louis the Ninth reigned. King Louis the Ninth of France was influential in bringing the first formal institutions for the blind to the world in the year 1260, the “Quinze-Vingts” hospice (in English, “fifteen score” or 300).
13
Valentin HaĂźy
Valentin HaĂźy was born in the year 1745 into a family of weavers. He was also a skilled linguist who spoke ten living languages. Due to his insterests with the blind he became aquatinted with the founder of the school for the deaf and learnt the manual Braille.
14
Louis Braille
Louis Braille, the fourth child of a saddle maker was born in the year 1809. At the age of three, Louis injured his eye in an accident while playing with his father’s tools. Fortunately, a priest - Abbé Jacques Palluy and a schoolmaster - Antoine Bécheret asked Louis Braille’s parents to allow him to attend regular school.
In October, 1824, Louis, now 15 years old, unveiled his new alphabet right after the start of school. He had found sixty-three ways to use a six-dot cell, though some dashes were still included.
Louis Braille spent the last eight years of his life teaching occasionally and Brailling books for the schools as he battled his declining health. People were starting to call the dot system by his name, “Braille”. In 1854, France adopted Braille as its official communications system for the blind. The need for the blind to write and read seems never to have occurred to many people.
15
16
2.2 | Structure of Braille
T
he strucure of Braile is broken down to a Braille cell, it
consists of six dots which are paired in two columns. Each column contains three dots, allowing them to be arranged in a grid of two dots horizontally and three dots vertically. There are a number of combinations these six dots can take to represent a character.
For ease in understanding, each dot is numbered 1, 2, and 3 from the top to the bottom of the left column and 4, 5, and 6 from the top to the bottom of the right column.
17
1
4
2
5
3
6
18
3.3 | Structure of Braille - Alphabets
a
b
c
d
e
k
l
m
n
o
u
v
w
In Braille, characters written are formed out of a single cell or multiple cells. All the alphabets are represented in one Braille cell. To understand the alphabet in Braille, memorize the dot patterns for the first ten letters, that is from ‘a’ to ‘j’.
f
g
h
i
p
q
r
s
x
y
z
j
t
The dot patterns for the next ten letters, ‘k’ to ‘t’, are the same as the first ten but with an additional dot in position 3. The dot patterns for the letters ‘u’, ‘v’, ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’ are the same as the letters ‘a’ to ‘e’ with additional dots in positions 3 and 6.
3.1 | Structure of Braille - Capital Letters
There are no capital letters in the braille alphabet. The “capital sign or capital indicator’’ is inserted before the specifically required letter, to indicate as to what will be read will be the Capital of that letter. 1
4
2
5
3
6
Dot 6 is a Capital Sign or a Capital Indicator
When two capital signs are inserted in front of a Braille word it indicates that the entire word is capitalized. There are Braille indictor signs for italics, letters that mean words, single cell words and more.
Two capital symbols denotes a whole capitalised word.
21
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J 22
23
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
24
2.3 | Braille and Languages
A Braille cell on its own has no meaning; the meaning of a particular braille cell is determined by the Braille code it is being used in. A Braille cell conveys different kinds of information in different languages. The interpretation of a Braille cell will be language dependent. Since this jumble of dots moulds it self to the local script to be read and written tangibly, the meaning of the cell becomes dependent on the language in which it is being used.
Braille on its own is not a language, however, it has been adapted into many languages. It is just another means with which to read a language just as in English, French, Greek, Hindi, Arabic and many more.
English Russian Greek Hindi
25
A
B
C
D
The languages that use Latin are very easy to adapt in Braille with few changes, however some languages that do not use Latin script for example Greek, Hebrew, Russian and Arabic would have cells assigned to the new alphabet according to their sound value in Latin alphabet.
The alphabetic order of the national script is disregarded when that language is being transliterated in Latin. For example, in the Greek language, ‘gamma’ is written as Latin ‘g’, however, it has the alphabetic position of gamma is ‘c’ in the national order (alpha, beta and gamma). However there are some languages that do not maintain Latin sound values when made Braille compatible to their script and languages. These languages are Japanese Kana, Korean Hangul and the Tibetan Braille.
26
Greek Braille
27
28
29
Greek Braille
The Greek alphabetical order changes when transliterated into Latin for Braille. ‘Gamma,’ has the third position in the national alphabetical order becomes seventh when adapted to Braille; therefore getting the code for ‘g’ as assigned in the Standard English Braille. Similarly, ‘zeta’ has the sixth position in the Greek alphabetical order, but is given the code ‘z’ in Greek Braille. The below illustrates this.
a - alpha
e - epsilon
b - beta
g - gamma
d - delta
z - zeta
30
Greek Braille
31
a
b
g
d
e
l
m
n
x
o
f
c
y
w
z
h
q
i
k
p
r
s
t
u
The braille alphabet of the Greek language is based on international braille conventions, generally corresponding to Latin transliteration.
32
Japanese Braille
33
34
Japanese Braille
Vowel: a
Vowel: e
Vowel: i
Vowel: o
Basic Japanese Braille code is very logical because of the differences in phonology and orthography between English and Japanese. The coding uses the three dots in the upper left corner to represent a vowel and those in the lower right corner to represent a consonant which are combined to construct the syllable.
35
Vowel: u
Consonant: R
Syllable: Ra
Syllable: Re
Syllable: Ri
Syllable: Ro
Syllable: Ru
36
Bharti Braille
37
38
Bharti Braille The adaptation of Braille to Indian languages is known as Bharti Braille. Due to the complexities of the writing system in Indian languages, (as they are phonetic in nature). Braille did not exist in the Indian context, after a conference held at Beirut in 1951, it was concluded that the possibility of adapting languages that are phonetic in nature did exist.
It is important to note that Bharti Braille has taken the best approach to presenting Indian languages through conventional Braille, by using the phonetic equivalents from standard English Braille. However, since there are only 63 different combinations available, only the basic vowels and the consonants of the Indian languages, which are about fifty in number, have been accommodated. Ligatures or mataras have therefore been eliminated.
Bharti Braille assigns the cells to the basic sounds of the Indian languages (called aksharas) in a manner, where vowels and consonants that find direct equivalents in English are given the same representation as in English. The problem that is faced is that since all the Indian languages share the same Braille representation, it will be difficult to identify when a language switch occurrs in multi-lingual texts. 39
40
Bharti Braille
l
41
42
Russian Braille
43
44
Russian Braille
45
Russian Braille is the braille alphabet of the Russian language. It is based on the Latin transliteration of Cyrillic.
46
Welsh Braille
47
48
Welsh Braille
b
a
ff
49
c
ch
g
d
ng
m
n
o
p
s
t
th
u
w
dd
e
i
h
ph
f
l
ll
r
rh
y 50
Polish Braille
51
52
Polish Braille
53
a
ą
b
c
ć
h
i
j
k
l
ó
p
q
r
s
x
y
z
d
e
ę
f
g
ł
m
n
ń
o
ś
t
u
v
w
54
South African Braille
55
56
South African Braille
a
á
e
d
ë
j
57
k
é
f
g
h
l
m
n
à
c
b
è
ê
i
í
ï
o
ó
ô
58
South African Braille
ö
û
z
59
p
q
ü
r
v
s
t
u
ú
w
x
y
ý
60
2.4 | The Nemeth Code
Learning maths and sciences can be a challenge for visually impaired individuals as it is difficult to provide the conceptual frameworks that are needed to solve math and science problems, visually impaired students often shy away from picking disciplines that require manipulation of graphic or symbolic information.
The Need For the Nemeth Code Standard Literary Braille Code does have some limitations. It was originally developed so that blind people could read but the original writings missed out on mathematical and scientific notations. In the standard Braille code numbers ‘’0’’ through ‘’9’’ are equivalent to the first ten letters of the alphabet. The letter “A” is written as the number “1”. Numbers from “0” to “9” had the same symbol as “A” to “J”.
To avoid confusion a numeric indicator precedes the number distinguishing it from an alphabet. Basic mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and the equals sign did not exist. This made learning math almost impossible.
61
Development of the Nemeth Code
The Nemeth code was developed for mathematical and scientific notations. Developed by Dr. Abraham Nemeth as part of his doctoral studies in mathematics in the year 1946. It was in 1952, that the Braille authority of North America (BANA) accepted the Nemeth Code as the standard code for representing math and science expressions in Braille. It provides a conceptual framework for the blind to use in solving mathematical equations.
The Nemeth Code is not an expanded version of the Literary Braille Code, there are differences. The nemeth code uses the concept of the dropped or lower-cell numerals rather than the upper-cell ones seen in the literary braille code. 1
4
2
5
3
6
Upper Cell
Lower Cell
In addition to the numbers which are different, Literary Code contractions must not be used under certain circumstances, and some symbols are different.
62
Lower Cell Numbers
63
A
B
C
D
E
1
2
3
4
5
F
G
H
I
J
6
7
8
9
0
64
The above is the Nemeth representation of the math symbol to “add, (+).�
65
Basic Math Examples 66
Signs of Operation
Plus +
Minus
Multiplication
Division
Signs of Comparison
67
Equals =
Greater Than >
Less Than <
Proportion
68
Defeating Blindness
71 3.1 | The Dot Smartwatch 80 3.2 | The Braille Reader: A Concept 81 3.3 | Be My Eyes: App
69
70
3.1 | The Dot Smartwatch
â&#x20AC;&#x153; We needed to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability. â&#x20AC;? - Stevie Wonder, Grammy Awards 2016.
T
he DOT Braille Smartwatch project was developed in
South Korea, DOT the first Braille Smartwatch sets out to provide an interactive device for blind and visually impaired people. Visually impaired and blind individuals can benefit from DOT in all areas of life: DOT makes communication easy and private, provides fast access to information anywhere, makes navigation and transport more convenient and safe, enables efficient, independent and joyful education, improves work performance and increases job opportunities, supports leisure and sports activities. Apps for Braille education, social networking, navigation, newsfeed, weather and many more are already in development. The following pages illustrate the design concept behind the smartwatch
71
The smart Braille watch, ‘Dot’ A stylish, wearable device that outputs text in Braille on the watch-face.
72
73
74
75
76
Dot Smartwatch: Usability
T
he DOT Smartwatch shows of a simple design. On the
face of the watch is a Braille display which has four cells, and below that are two touch sensors that allow users to scroll through and read each notification. The right side of the watch has three controls: the “Select” button, the “Dot Crown” dial and the “Home” button. These controls are used to operate the watch’s different functions. The watch is charged via a USB charger which is included with the device.
The Dot Watch works by pairing up with a smartphone via Bluetooth. Users must first install the Dot Watch app, available in the iTunes and Google Play app stores. Once paired, users can begin receiving notifications from their phone, tell the time and date, and use other features. From the app, individuals can configure the watch’s settings, check the battery status, set an alarm and use the “learn Braille” function, a feature which allows users to send a message to the watch in Braille.
77
The DOT Smartwatch is an innovative device for indivduals who are blind, who now have a new option for accessing information via smartphones.
78
79
3.2 | The Braille Reader: A Concept
T
he Braille Reader is a design concept created by the
Korean designer Juchun Jung. The Braille Reader allows individual who have vision impairments or are blind to read printed materials. Characters in written materials such as books or documents are recognized through the Braille Reader. The reader then converts the characters to braille which can then be read by the user. The below illustration shows the basic concept as to how the braille reader would be used. Start: Once turned on, the reader will begin to recognize characters on the page. Dot: Raised platforms are formed as the reader converts the characters into braille.
Next: When this button is clicked the cells on the reader change to the next character that is being read.
80
3.3 | Be My Eyes: App
A
person with perfect vision might find it difficult to
imagine struggling with reading directions on a map or looking at a productâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nutritional information, but for a visually impaired indivdual, sometimes the simplest tasks require assistance. Be My Eyes is an app that connects the blind to global volunteers through a live-video chat. A volunteer can help with activities such as describing a picture or figuring out the train schedule.
81
The app prompts users to choose whether they want to help or need help (‘I am sighted’ versus ‘I am blind’). The iPhone’s VoiceOver feature already allows the blind to use synthetic speech and a system Braille keyboard to communicate. A simple notification alerts the volunteer whenever a visually impaired person requires help, which they can choose to accept when available or pass along when busy. Once a connection is established, the two speak over video conferencing as the volunteer describes the scene and offers assistance. Over 17,000 people have signed up to ‘lend their eyes’ to the blind.
82
Be My Eyes: App
User interface of the Be My Eyes App on an iPhone.
83
“An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” - Mahatma Gandhi
84
Acknowledgements T
his project could not have been realised without a great
deal of guidance, mental and practical support. I would like to deeply thank those people, who during the several months in which this project lasted, provided me with all the knowledge I needed to complete this project.
I would like to thank Nicholas Jeeves and Jon Melton, for their guidance and support during the entire project. Despite the complexity of this project, both lecturers never hesitated to answer my questions, provide design advice and feedback. I deeply appreciate your support.
A special thank you goes to G F Smith for printing and binding this book to itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finished product.
85
86
Bibliography Books British Braille - A Restatement of Standard English Braille: Braille Authority of the United Kingdom World Braille Usage: Perkins
Websites brailleauthority.org colourblindawareness.org livestrong.com pharmabraille.com ridbc.org.au rnib.org.uk royalblind.org theinspirationroom.com who.intl
Images artdoxa.com | Page 2 aroundpilipinas.com | Page 7 bbc.com | Page 11 H. Rousseau (Designer) | Page 14 deviantart.net | Pages 27, 59 Oliver Ebert | Page 63 freepix.com | Page 37, 51
87
88
Index A
I
B
J
Alphabets 19
Be My Eyes: App 81–83 Bharti Braille 37–42 Blindness 3 Braille 13, 17
C
Capital Letters 21 Colour Blindness 5 Complete Blindness 4
Ishihara Plate Test 5
Japanese Braille 33–36
L
Languages 25 Louis Braille 13, 15
P
E
Polish Braille 51–54
G
Russian Braille 25, 43–46
H
Social 10 South African Braille 55–60
Environmental 10
Greek Braille 25, 27–32
Hindi Braille 25
89
R S
T
Technological 9 The Braille Reader: A Concept 80 The Dot Smartwatch 71–78 The Nemeth Code 61–67
V
Valentin Haüy 14
W
Welsh Braille 47–50 World Health Organisation 2
90
Being Blind
Akshay Shah