99% Invisible - 360- The Universal Page

Episode Date: July 3, 2019

Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s where Andrew edited essays and interviews, laid out articles, and was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the words as he did with the expression of the ideas in the text. But as much as Andrew loves print, he has a condition that will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically. He’s going blind. And this fact has made him deeply curious about how blind people experience literature and the long history of designing a tactile language that sometimes suffered from trying to be too universal. The Universal Page

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Andrew Leland has always loved to read. As a fifth grader, he was the kid who sat on a utility box during recess reading the Hobbit while everyone else played kickball. In middle school, he learned the trade names of the book imprints that published the drugie

contemporary fiction that he was starting to get into. And in 2003, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco to work for his favorite publisher, McSweeney's. It was my dream job, and working there exacerbated my already intense fetish for print. That's Andrew. I got to live out my fantasy of being an ink stained wretch, even if that meant logging 12-hour days at an inkless computer. I edited essays and interviews, laid out articles,

and took a weird amount of pleasure in typographical minutia, like italicizing commas and rewriting headlines so they fit the frame just so. At McSweeney's, books and magazines were never just containers for words. They were works of art onto themselves. And I was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the print as I did with the expression

of the ideas in the text. But as much as Andrew loved print, he still loves it, in fact, he also has a condition that will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically. I'm going blind, really, really slowly. Right now, it's like I've got a foot in both worlds, blind and sighted. I have it a generative retinal disease that's given me severe tunnel vision, so basically no peripheral vision. It's like I'm peering at the world through a toilet paper tube, one that gets a little narrower every few months. 10

Alright, I'm going to try to read this and then see if I got it right. Can we... My retinal specialist told me that I probably don't need to worry about losing the ability to read for another five years or so, but I've already started using a special digital program to learn Braille, which is not easy. Be cocky. What? I want to get a jump-starting before I actually need it. Recru...recuckly...what?

A recycle. Can we recycle a metal can? I know I'll still be able to experience books for the rest of my life. I'm lucky to be going blind in the digital age and the golden age of audio. There's an abundance of well-produced audio books and technology that can read aloud almost anything that appears on a screen. Puzzles? My niece can ride a unicycle or a duped puzzles? My niece can ride a unicycle or do puzzles. My niece can ride a unicycle or do puzzles. What the fuck does that mean?

My niece can do no such thing. But despite all that, there's still some mellow tragedy in the idea that in a few years, I'll probably no longer be able to read print. After a life-spent loving books, there's now a real urgency for me in the question of how blind people experience literature. I find myself deeply curious about what graphic design might mean to someone who can't see, and so I started looking into the history of reading technologies for the blind. Traditionally, books are visual objects, and for centuries now, blind and sighted designers have been arguing over the most effective

way to translate the visual ink print book into an accessible form for people without sight. For as long as blind people have been reading, there's been this tension between systems that try to stay close to the original form of a book and systems that dramatically depart from our ideas of what a book can be. Cited designers have made incredible breakthroughs to create non-visual forms of reading for blind people. But as one blind critic pointed out, Cited designers have a bad habit of, quote, talking to the

fingers in the language of the eyes. So the history of blind reading is really the history of finding a new language for the fingers and for the ears, one that captures the essential elements of the ink print book, but in a new language that's unbound from the visual. And that history centers around two main shapes, lines and dots. Our story starts in 18th century Europe before Braille was invented, before blind people were even taught to read at all.

First off, no one thinks that it's possible for bond kids to learn. That's Mike Hudson, the museum director at the American printing house for the blind in Louisville, Kentucky. And if they could, no one knows how to do it. Without access to education, blind people were overwhelmingly poor, and their employment prospects were dim. If their families had enough money and time to support them, they usually lived at home, like adult children sitting idly around the house.

Many others were forced to beg on the street. There were a handful of institutions in Europe to support the poorest cases, but they pitted the blind and hid them away from public view. But then this guy named Valentin Awee comes along. Awee was born into a family of weavers in France and he was a skilled linguist. He was first inspired to help the blind in 1771. We saw a group of blind people being mocked during a street festival in Paris. They had been given dunce caps and giant fake glasses and they were made to play musical instruments and pretend to read books. So how we founded the first known school for the blind.

It was called the Royal Institute in Paris. But even as he's getting the school going, how we kept a side gig. And a wheeze side gig is as a translator for the King of France. And so every now and then you'll get these fancy embossed invitations to various events. And one day, one of our we students, a kid named Francois LeSour, touched one of them. And Francois LeSour notices that he can feel something

on these invitations. And that gives our we the idea, the idea to develop this idea of embossed printing in raised letters. So in 1786, our we makes the first machine embossed book for the blind. A treatise on blind education. It's written in print, the kind that cited readers would recognise, but the text is all raised so that blind students can feel the shape of the letters. And it's a radical move, not just the first book for blind readers in history, but basically the beginning of the idea that blind people can be educated.

But there are a few problems. Well, first off, no one can afford to buy these books. Okay. That's because the books are massive and prohibitively expensive, but they're also just really hard to read. They're filled with ornate 18th-century letterforms with their curly cues and flourishes which are confusing to the fingertips. It's not until many years later, near the end of Awe's life in 1821, that a very different

blind reading system begins to develop, one that uses dots instead of lines. It starts when a captain from Napoleon's army visits the school to share a system that he developed for French soldiers. The captain describes how the system allowed his men to silently communicate with each other on battlefields at night. This is a clip from a very lively educational movie about this history. The director of the school at the time led a group of students experiment with the embossed

pages that the captain had left behind, and in that group was a 12-year-old blind kid, named Louie Braille. Over the next few years, he began to adapt that military code for blind people as an alternative to raised print. Louis, you've been working on that for days. Your mother's worried. Can't you take a break? No, I am so close.

I've got it worked out so that all the letters of the alphabet are represented by raised dots in different combinations. Louis Braille simplified the military code and maximized its efficiency. He substituted the 12-dot system developed by the captain into a 6-dot system, which allowed blind people to read faster by recognizing a letter with the touch of a single finger. And while this code was inscrutable to sighted people, it was the system that blind people needed, designed by a blind person who understood intimately the needs of those reading by touch.

Another advocate for the blind would say of Braille, it bears the stamp of genius, like the Roman alphabet itself. But despite its effectiveness, Braille didn't catch on right away. It wouldn't become the dominant system in France for another 30 years, and it'd be nearly a century before it became standard for blind readers in the US. Because it was effectively suppressed by a well-intentioned world-famous visionary of blind education. Around the same time that Braille was quietly developing his new reading system, an American named Samuel Gridley Howe came to visit the Royal Institute in France. He was doing research and anticipation of opening the first school for the blind in the

U.S. And I wish I could tell you that while in France how discovered the wonders of Braille, but that's not how it went down. Instead he saw the raised letter books and he was intrigued, but in true American fashion, he found all their fancy flourishes, impractical, and typical of European excess. So he decided to make his own system that improved on the Europeans work. And he came back and he modified it a bit. That's Kim Charlson, the director of the library at the Perkins School, which Howe established in Massachusetts in 1829.

Because they were using a more gothic style font that he felt was a little too ornamental and more difficult to read by touch. So if one of our wee's French books looked sort of like an ancient home in a horror movie whose letters rise up in fleshy pertuberances, then House System is similar, but it looks more runic, tokeny, elvish. How sharpened his letters curves into points to make them more distinct under the fingertips. The letter O, for example, is shaped like a diamond.

How calls his new system Boston Line Type? Boston Line Type is really the beginning of literacy as we know it as a movement for people who are blind in the United States. And like the older French system, Boston Line Type was designed to be read both by blind and sighted people. And if you're able to see and look at one of these books, the letters are totally easily legible. Boston Line Type allows blind people and sighted people to sit down together and to read.

There's no barrier between them. And this idea was really important to how. He didn't want blind people to use a system, like Braille, that was separate from what sighted people used. He thought it would isolate blind people and prevent them from integrating into the wider world. Long before the concept of universal design had been articulated,

it was informing how's thinking about how to design for people with disabilities. I know so, you can imagine the argument. Well, we want our kids that are blind and visual impaired to use the same system that our cited kids use, right? That sounds good, right? But it turns out that raise letters are just not as good as a Braille. Why not? the same system that our sided kids use, right? That sounds good, right? But it turns out that raise letters

are just not as good as a braille. Why not? So it's harder. It just is harder. That's not intuitive to people who are sided, but those letter forms are just not unique enough from each other. Sided people look at braille and they go,

oh, it all looks the same. But under the finger, those raised dots dots underneath your finger are just more tangible. Okay, they just auger. And not only that, you can write in braille. I'm like raised print. It doesn't require a big heavy metal printing press. All you need is a small, simple tool called a slate and stylus that fits in your pocket. By the 1860s, some schools of the blind in the US had begun experimenting with Braille, and while many faculty members still resisted it as an arbitrary, impenetrable system, the blind students who were exposed to Braille argued passionately for its superiority to

raised letters. At the Missouri School for the Blind, students passed each other notes and reportedly even love letters in Braille since they knew their teachers wouldn't be able to read them if they got caught. But how had invested a massive amount of time and resources into developing, distributing, and promoting Boston Line Type? And he'd become a hugely influential celebrity

in the field of blind education. He was a master fundraiser, and key to that fundraising apparatus was the spectacle of a deaf blind girl named Laura Bridgeman, who how taught to read using Boston Lines Type. Bridgeman was the first deaf blind person in history to get an education, more than a full generation before Helen Keller did. This achievement made Laura Bridgeman and how, international stars, which Howe leveraged to make Boston Line Type one of the dominant print mediums for the blind across the US. Like Howe, many of the directors and faculty at schools for the blind were cited, and many

of them believed that they knew which system was best. Well, it's easy for me reading a print letter, so it's going to be easy for them with their fingers, you know, and he'd I think it's a failure of imagination or a failure of empathy or a failure of experience. Catherine Cudlick directs the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability at San Francisco State, where she's also a history professor, and she doesn't even really buy house argument that Boston Line Type was universal. You might have thought of this universal, but it's universal in that way that the colonizer thinks, thinks are universal.

It's like, you know, these poor native peoples need educating and we'll try to bring them up to my level and make them like me. They didn't get the blind people to be the experts. There's a crucial part is, I mean, that's like a disability, rights refrain is nothing. Nothing about us without us, yeah. In fact, the new way that people are starting to say it is nothing without us. Period. I think how probably made a good faith effort to create a universal system,

one that predicted universal design, one that he hoped would have raised the line dividing the blind from the sighted. But paradoxically, in committing so strongly to the universal page of Boston line type, how helped delay the adoption of a much better system by close to a hundred years in the US. A system where the blind person, Louis Braille, was the expert. By the early 20th century, how had died. There were growing numbers of organizations dedicated to serving the blind, and more and more of them were being led by blind people. In 1921, leaders from the most influential of these groups gathered in rural Iowa to form

the American Foundation for Blind. The AFB quickly became the most powerful blindness organization in the US, and one of their first priorities was to make Braille, the dominant system. But, Americans being Americans, the same thing happened that it happened with raised letters. We decided that we could design things better than those pretentious Europeans could. So a whole cottage industry arose, with all sorts of competing systems. Braille knockoffs. So, now we're heading into what we call the War of the Dots. Have you heard of that? We could spend an entire episode on the War of the Dots with Mike Hudson as our trusting narrator,

but in a nutshell, before Braille truly won out in the US, there was another 50 years of competing tactile systems. This period drove many blind readers bananas because every library for the blind was filled with books printed in these multiple competing systems. New York Point, Moon type, American modified Braille. There are others, by the way. We're not going to go into them. But at one point, the head of the Perkins school says, you know, if anybody invents another code for the blind, we want to shoot them on the spot. Ha ha ha. The decisive battle in the war of the dots finally came in 1909. Cities like New York were rapidly growing,

and for the first time, they had enough blind children to start building day schools for the blind. And so they have a nice big, two day knockdown, drag out meeting of the New York Board of Education to decide which code they're going to use in the New York City schools. So they bring in all the heavy hitters. Okay.

I mean, everybody's anybody in line is testifies before this body. And at the end, they take a big vote, and they vote for Braille. Okay? It's the beginning of the end for the competing codes. By 1917, the rest of the country follows New York's lead, and the newly standardized English Braille becomes the main way blind children are taught to read in the US. And with their increasing self-determination and literacy, blind people are more able to integrate into society than ever before. Blind children are starting to be mainstreamed into

public schools, and for the first time, some blind people are getting office jobs using tech-like Braille typewriter so they can work alongside-sided people, as equals. It's what how had hoped Boston line-type would help them do. But for all Braille's advantages over raised print, it didn't work for all blind people. Like the thousands of soldiers who were coming back from war with eye injuries, who hadn't learned Braille as kids. And as you probably noticed, listening to me struggle to read that stupid sentence about my niece doing puzzles. Puzzles?

My niece can write a unicycle or a dupe of puzzles. Puzzles? Puzzles? By niece can ride a unicycle or a dupe puzzles. Learning Braille as an adult is really hard. My niece can ride a unicycle or dupe puzzles. But as sound recording became easier and more affordable, those people who'd become blind later in life had new options. Options that would transform our ideas of what a book can be. Translating inkprint books into sound might seem more straightforward than building a tactile reading system. After all, books were born out of a few thousand years of people telling

each other stories, and we all learned to read by having books read to us. But early efforts to make recordings of books for blind readers brought with them a new set of design challenges. The American Foundation for the Blind partnered with the Carnegie Corporation to publish experimental books on phonographic records. They called them talking books. They hired narrators and pressed the recordings onto long-playing records, 25 minutes aside.

These books were circulated by blind people about a decade before LPs became available to the wider public. The first audio books and the first LPs were made for blind readers. But these talking books raised big questions. What should a book sound like? How do you translate the elements of a codex, which is a fancy word for the thing

that we usually call a book with paper pages, ink, and binding. How do you translate one of those things into sound? The definition of the book basically imploded right after these talking books started to be developed, because all sorts of producers started to come up with new ideas for things that they would call talking books that certainly had nothing to do with the Codex form. That's Mara Mills. She's professor at NYU who works at the intersection of media and disability studies. And I promise she's the last academic I'm going to introduce you to.

Let's piece our chapter for a minute and listen to it bringing the feedback like songs. The Cornell Ornithology Lab, for instance, decided that they wanted to take some of their bird song recordings and make a talking book for blind people out of them. They're wrong to the mongda finest of American birds, and they rival and perhaps the past when Snow White came out as an early animated talking movie, the AFB decided they wanted to make a talking book version of a talking movie. Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Wolves recorded solely for the use of the line. There was no book origin.

They called it a book and they circulated it as a talking book, but it was a audio description of the images in an animated film with some of the sound files and dialogue from that film. The Huntsman, Kripp, Coser, and Coser. How pretend you are! When he was right behind Snow White, he drew his big night, then Snow White noticed a shadow on the ground. Very quickly, all sorts of things began to be called books that had very marginal relationship to the book form. And as talking books became more elaborate and theatrical, more filled with sound effects

and music, some blind people grew frustrated. More and more blind readers wound up breaking their record players trying to speed up the voices of the narrators. They weren't listening for sonic aesthetic pleasure. They wanted to dam information, and the fancy productions moved too slowly for how fast they wanted to read. Which is the same impulse that makes people listen to podcasts at double speed.

As with raised letter books, the ornamental flourishes of music and sound effects got in the way of blind people's desire for speed. And so talking books began to sound different. The holy Bible, the King James V. Read by Alexander Storvey. No nonsense narrators, like Alexander Skorby, became more popular in the 1940s and 50s.

And their voices became almost like fonts, standardized, legible, and, most importantly, conveying information without getting in the way, more like the narrators of contemporary audiobooks. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. the narrators of contemporary audiobooks. The book historian Matthew Rubery told me that if you bring up the name Alexander's scoreby with a blind person of a certain age, their eyes will fill with tears because of the associations they have with his voice.

They grew up listening to him, reading him. So perhaps this is my consolation as I become a blind reader. I can just trade a visual typeface for a verbal one. Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. In some ways, my fears about losing my visual relationship to books resembles the anxieties that sighted people have about the demise of print in the digital age. As more and more people read on screens, there's an old guard who bemoans these new forms of reading as inferior. These critics believe that the trusty old technology of the book will always be the superior vehicle for ideas.

You can hear this conservatism and condescension, not only in those people who align the e-book, but also in the voices of people who say that you haven't really read a book if you listen to it. They contend that real reading only happens with the eyes. But the history of blindness and reading shows that the way we read has always been in flux. The media scholars and book historians I talked to all told me the same thing. Reading doesn't happen in the eyes or the ears or the fingers. It happens in the brain.

And this is a nice thing to hear if you're going blind. It makes me feel like, forget my stupid eyes. I'll still have my brain, and that's where all the good stuff happens anyway. But this idea doesn't really soften or mask the fact that blindness is inescapably a loss. No amount of historical research or conceptual reframing can hide the simple equation at work here. I love books, ink print books, with marginalia and typefaces and dingbats, and going blind will take that away from me.

But I can't let that be my only conclusion, that blindness equals loss full stop. Mara Mills told me about someone she met, whose story could offer me an example of a different way to approach my life as a blind reader. His name is Harvey Lauer. He's a blind guy who worked at the VA, testing all kinds of technology for the visually impaired. When you turn on the machine, you hear all the sounds in the earphone. This is Harvey using an optophone, a kind of scanner, that would look at text and turn it into a series of tones representing the shapes of the letters. It's another spin on universal design for blind readers. With an optophone, you wouldn't need to create special books for the blind at all.

With training, a blind person could read an inkprint book using one of these devices. The optophone was first developed in 1912, but this recording is from 1971. Reading sounds like this. First off, find the line. And then we'll read. Incredibly, some blind people actually learned how to read this way. After a lot of practice, they could hear these sounds and decode the words they represented.

Reading entire novels, using what came to be called musical print. It's at the necessary functions of the... Using the devices he tested for the VA, Harvey could read by vibration through musical print, plus Braille and super sped up talking books. He reads using more of his body, more of his senses than perhaps anyone else on the planet. His colleagues called him a cyborg. He walked around with these devices dangling around his neck wherever he went, emitting vibrations and synthetic musical tones.

I had to turn up the threshold after empirical... Mara told me that this sometimes led to funny incidents of confusion. Like the time Harvey walked into a 7-11 and heard all these electronic tones coming out of the various machines in the store. He tried decoding them because it seemed to him like they should be alphabetic. And then he realized, nope, there's just electronic tones. It's just the cash register. Nope, there's just electronic tones. It's just the cash register. Harvies mistake in the 7-11 suggests to me a way that my future as a blind reader might

actually signal something other than a total loss. Blindness could add something to my life, even as it takes something else away. Learning to read in new ways through new senses could increase my appreciation for the world around me. Harvey told Mara that he finds the electronic tones and chords of the optophone beautiful. He said they remind him of Debussy's music, which gives me hope, that whichever way I end up reading, through sped-ups, synthetic speech, or braille, or maybe some high-tech post-optophonic cyborg system that's yet to be invented, that I'll find the beauty in that kind of reading too.

I really should use the other earphones and plug in the other speaker. How are the pothuses? Replace it with a more adequate one. I thought you were to fight the part for hypothesis. There's not necessarily a fuck down the qually. Coming up, our composer, Sean Rial, gives us a short lesson in reading with the optophone and breaks down the music they composed for this episode using optophonic letters. After this. So I'm now in the studio with Sean Rial. So the song at the very end of the story was a special song that were related to the episode. So you can you describe how you made the music for that particular section of the episode? Yeah, so when we were doing our edit, everyone was just so fascinated by the optophone at the end of the story.

Right. And throughout that whole section, everyone was just going, wow, and just like the sort of sounds of it were just entrancing. Yeah. And so I was just like taken with how like musical it was, and I was like, this would be a really cool thing to use as an instrument. And so then I asked Andrew, would you say if there was a way to get samples of the alphabet basically to not only like make music out of, you know, like the sounds,

but like to actually like spell something out and like make a message, have, you know, lyrics to the song. So cool. I found out that it's very hard to actually write with with optophone Samples and then I'll talk a little bit more about that later I want to play you some of this because when I was listening to the tape of like all these different letters I was really struck actually with how intuitive it is. Oh cool. Okay, so let's hear some first thing I'm going to do is going to play you in oh so here's a no Okay, so let's hear some. First thing I'm going to do is I'm going to play you in O. So here's an O.

What the Optiphone is doing, it's actually scanning text, and so it's basically making an auditory shape of the letter. So the O, if you think of the left of the O, you're going to have two mid-tones, very close to the middle, and then as the circle opens up, you're gonna have a tone that is high and a tone that is low. And then they're gonna close back up. Joins back up. Okay, so you have like two tones in the middle.

And then it expands high and low and then goes back down to being in the middle. And that creates the shape of an O. So you're just scanning across a letter as if it's just printed type. Yeah. And so here's that same oh again, but slowed down. So you can really hear it.

Okay. Okay, cool, cool, cool. Okay, I think I got it. I think I almost got that one. Yeah, okay. So on then another letter that I thought was the best letter actually is a W. And it's all that this one, I think you'll really be able to hear this one

because unlike the O or actually most of the letters in the alphabet, the W doesn't have any like vertical stacking. So it's really just like, you really do like read it left to right. Like there's one point at a time. So like you don't hear two tones simultaneously. So you should be able to trace the W as it goes. High, low, high, low, high. Exactly. Okay. So, here's the W. And then here it is slow down. Yeah, then here it is slow it down.

Okay, do that again. Yeah. What I really love is that you can tell that the midpoint of the W is lower than the other two points than the outside. Right. Oh, that's so interesting. So they're choosing a certain type of W. It doesn't go all the way. It isn't a W where the middle goes all the way to the top line.

It's one where it goes in the middle. I'm interested. Yeah, it's extremely specific to whatever font you have, whatever page you're reading. Makes sense, yeah. So, to make the music, I was listening to a lot of raw tape of Harvey Lauer just playing with his optophone and kind of like being odd at it in the same way that we were and so that was and so that was just like so neat and so there's there's like this type of him just reading numbers with it and just like really getting a kick out of it. There's an open four by golly. There's a good five. These are nice numbers. Boy those are nice

numbers to read. He developed the octophone so like he's probably the person most fluent in octophone ease in the world. Yeah. But like you said, like this is a scanner that goes across any print that there is. So it's like he's reading a certain display because there sometimes, you know, like I make a seven with a crosshatch through it, for example. And so that would sound different than a normal seven without a crosshatch across the middle of it. Yeah. So even though, you know, he knows the optophone better than anybody, every time it scans a new font, a new typeface,

you get something new from it. He gets something new from it. It's a really enjoying reading. That is so cool. Okay, that's so great. Yeah. So inspired by the optophone, you composed a couple of songs, and one of them was at the end, and it had a message inside of it that was a true optophone

message inside of the song. So what did it say? If very true optophone message, it said optophone. And you just say, okay, that's great, because that's the O's, which you can kind of figure out and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. And that's exactly like leading to my next point. Like, I tried out a lot of like different messages, because I originally thought like, oh, I could like have like a whole sentence or something, but I noticed that because these sounds are coming just one letter at a time, It was actually really like melodically important. I found to have multiple letters that repeat. So, your optophone actually kind of has a pattern to it. It's O-P-T-O-P-H-O-N-E, and so it's like, and so actually every three letters is an O.

And so... it takes on the characteristic of music because of that. Okay. So let's remind people of the little section of I'm so cool. Sounds so good. Could you hear the letters? I totally could. I mean, you had to tell me what it was before I heard it, but, you know, I understood it a little bit. This is so amazing.

Thank you so much. And I'm so pleased that you created music inspired by the Octophone. It was so much fun to do. I really, yeah, I really like appreciated being inspired to do this. Cool. OK, let's hear the last song in. We'll go out. 1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5-1.5- That little bit of Octophone, says 99% invisible. 99% invisible was Was Produced This Week by Andrew Leeland and edited by Delaney Hall.

Mixed in Tech Production by Sriviusif, Music by Sean Reale. Katie Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. Thrust the team is Avery Trollman, Vivian Lee, Joe Rosenberg, and Mithett Sheryl, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Many thanks this week to Sorry Outchooler and David Weimer. We found out about the story of Boston Line Type from an exhibition they put together called Touch This Page. The exhibition is also online at touchthispage.com where you can see examples of Boston Line Type

and other precursors to Braille. Special thanks also to Jen Hale and Jennifer Arnott at the Perkins School, Matthew Rubrie of Queen Mary University of London, whose book about the history of talking books is awesome, and Walid Malise from North Eastern's College of Engineering. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% of Israel is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting.

Find them all at radiotopia.evm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI or on Instagram and read it too. But you need to run to our website and see video of the spectrogram of the Octophone letters that Sean composed is so cool. That's at 99PI.org. Radio tapio. From PRX.