Comment by kkylin

Comment by kkylin a day ago

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Like many others, I too would very much like to hear about this.

I taught our entry-level calculus course a few years ago and had two blind students in the class. The technology available for supporting them was abysmal then -- the toolchain for typesetting math for screen readers was unreliable (and anyway very slow), for braille was non-existent, and translating figures into braille involved sending material out to a vendor and waiting weeks. I would love to hear how we may better support our students in subjects like math, chemistry, physics, etc, that depend so much on visualization.

VogonPoetry 10 hours ago

I did a maths undergrad degree and the way my blind, mostly deaf friend and I communicated was using a stylized version of TeX markup. I typed on a terminal and he read / wrote on his braille terminal. It worked really well.

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  • kkylin 9 hours ago

    Thanks! Did you communicate in "raw" TeX, or was it compiled / encoded for braille? Can you point me at the software you used?

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    • VogonPoetry 5 hours ago

      Yes, mostly raw TeX, just plain ascii - not specially coded for Braille. This was quite a long time ago, mid 1980's, so not long after TeX had started to spread in computer science and maths communities. My friend was using a "Versa Braille" terminal hooked via a serial port to a BBC Micro running a terminal program that I'd written. I cannot completely remember how we came to an understanding of the syntax to use. We did shorten some items because the Versa Braille only had 20 chars per "line".

      He is still active and online and has a contact page see https://www.foneware.net. I have been a poor correspondent with him - he will not know my HN username. I will try to reach out to him.

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      • VogonPoetry an hour ago

        Now that I've been recalling more memories of this, I do remember there being encoding or "escaped" character issues - particularly with brackets and parentheses.

        There was another device between the BBC Micro and the "Versa Braille" unit. The interposing unit was a matrix switch that could multiplex between different serial devices - I now suspect it might also have been doing some character escaping / translation.

        For those not familiar with Braille, it uses a 2x3 array (6 bits) to encode everything. The "standard" (ahem, by country) Braille encodings are super-sub-optimal for pretty much any programming language or mathematics.

        After a bit of (me)memory refresh, in "standard" Braille you only get ( and ) - and they both encode to the same 2x3 pattern! So in Braille ()() and (()) would "read" as the same thing.

        I now understand why you were asking about the software used. I do not recall how we completely worked this out. We had to have added some sort of convention for scoping.

        I now also remember that the Braille terminal aggressively compressed whitespace. My friend liked to use (physical) touch to build a picture, but it was not easy to send spatial / line-by-line information to the Braille terminal.

        Being able to rely on spatial information has always stuck with me. It is for this reason I've always had a bias against Python, it is one of the few languages that depends on precise whitespace for statement syntax / scope.

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