Stuff You Should Know - How Braille Works

Episode Date: February 11, 2010

Josh and Chuck discuss the Braille alphabet -- from its origins in Charles Barbier's "night writing" system to the many different types of tactile alphabets that exist today -- in this episode of Stuff You Should Know. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Under 17 at a minute without parent. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. From HowStuffWorks.com. So Chuck, it's really hot here. Yes, we are still in Guatemala here on Thursday.

Yeah. Although we recorded this, we bypassed the spacetime continuum to fool you all. And it's actually quite comfortable here in the studio. It is, it's lovely. And hopefully neither one of us has died from typhoid at this point. Or been taken hostage.

Which I gotta tell you, I'm worried about. Right. And hopefully what's happening is you guys are reading about this on our blog at HowStuffWorks.com, the Stuff You Should Know blog. Right. Depending on our internet, we are uploading daily posts about our experience here.

Either that, or if what Chuck just said proves false, that means that we have spotty internet down in Guatemala and all of them will be uploaded the following week after we get back, right? That's it. Okay, so look for those live now on the blogs at HowStuffWorks.com or the week beginning the 15th.

Help. Shhh. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, with me is always a Charles W. Bryant. And guest producer, Matt Frederick. Yeah. Matt is filling in for Jerry, who's sick right now. Cause she's got the hepatitis.

No, she doesn't really. I got the hepatitis. No, you don't. What do you think they injected us with? Folks, we got hepatitis shots, by the way, because we are traveling to Central America. Guatemala. And they said that that's a good thing to get.

And I don't know what they inject you with. They inject you with inactive hepatitis, so your body can form antibodies. Right, sure. So when you get with the active one, it's like, you can't stay here. See, Jerry got sick and I was like, I feel good. I feel awful.

My arms hurt. I feel sore. I feel like I'm getting sick. Cause I also got the Tdap. Yeah, the tetanus diphtheria. Yeah. And I don't feel very good right now, Chuck. Do you remember last year when I got sick

for like 18 straight weeks? That was fun. Well, I'm hoping to fight this one off. So we've got Matty in here, which is a pleasure. Matt of Lines and Scissors, are you guys still together? Sort of. At one point, the singer left and the guitar player left and like, Matt was left with a drum kit

and like a part time keyboard player or something. Or you could make something these days with that. I think it's, weeks later, they decided they wanted to be in the band again though. So I think they were like, working on a reunion tour now. And it all began with a camping trip that one person wasn't invited to.

This is historic. So, Matt, good to have you here, my friend. I concur. Do you have an intro or should we just say, let's talk about Braille? Let's talk about Braille. I do a little bit, you know, much about Louis Braille? Yeah, sure.

Louis Braille invented Braille because he was a blind boy. You know how he got blind? Yeah, he stuck something sharp in his eye. He did. Yeah. In all, AWL. Yes, thank you. My thick tongue does not allow for a distinction

between AWL and AWL. Yeah, he did that when he was three years old. Yeah, his dad was a leather worker and he used the AWL, which is basically a very sharp pointed instrument with a, you could lobotomize somebody with it. It's a little big, but sure, it'd be a, he almost lobotomized himself with it.

He'd be a gruesome lobotomy. He was screwing around with it and it slid out of his hand and hit his eye, right? Yeah. And then what, he got infected? Yeah, he got infected and then he lost sight in his other eye because of sympathetic opthamia, which is when one eye says,

well, that eye is not gonna stick around and I'm gonna go off the duty as well. Yeah. But that wasn't mentioned in this article. I thought that was surprising. It is a bit surprising. That reminds me of a King of the Hill where Hank Hill goes blind in one eye

and then he goes blind in the other and Gary, his mom's boyfriend is like, I've never heard of an eye sympathetically shutting down before. I was hoping you were gonna say it has something to do with Khan. No, I can't do a good Khan. That was good.

All you gotta say is Khan. Right. I'm Laotian and then you're supposed to say, you're from the ocean. I can't do a good Hank Hill either. No, it does really good. I don't watch it anymore. Every time they brought Tom Petty on,

I'm like this. Is he on that show? Oh my God. You're kidding. As a character. Yeah. Or as Tom Petty. As a character?

Yeah, it's awful. I love Petty and I love King of the Hill. How do you love Tom Petty? Because he's great. I'm sorry, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. You're awful. Anyway, wow, we already got off on a tangent.

All right. Louis Braille was not one to be kept down. No. Despite it all sticking into his eye and going completely blind by age three. True. Right? Yeah, he was inspired, in fact,

some years later when he was a teen, by a visitor that came from the Royal Institution for Blind Youth. Right, a guy named Charles Barbier. Yeah. And this was in the early 1820s or mid 1820s, depending on who you ask. Late 1820s.

Other sources say early. Okay. Another issue with this article. All right. And this guy, Barbier, had invented a code called night writing to allow soldiers to communicate to each other in the dark. And this is not to be confused with night rider.

Or night swimming. No. Is it not night rider? I thought it was night rider. Night rider. I thought he invented the car. No, he invented night writing. Okay.

Totally different. And that did not catch on in army. Okay. Right? Right, so he went to the School for the Blind, where Louis Braille was 12 when Barbier visited, I guess. And boom. Yeah.

Smart little kid says, I can use this. He, yeah, and he could. And actually, within three years, he'd worked out the kinks. He basically optimized night riding and created his own system, which we know and love now is Braille. At age 15. Yeah.

By age 20, he published his first book in Braille. Awesome. It was probably large and bulky. But strangely enough, Braille didn't catch on globally or even in France until after he died. Right. And even then, it was popular with the Institute for Blind Youth, but it still wasn't super widespread.

Because, and this is something I didn't know, this is sort of like the totem pole cast. There's all these little tidbits I never knew. There were competing codes, and different inventors came up with different codes. So clearly, when there's different systems out there, it's gonna be hard to decide which one to use and hard for one to become widespread.

Right. So that's one reason. Did you notice there's no universal sign language? I believe I did know that. Yeah. One of the competing, I guess, tactile alphabet is what you would call these things in general. It was created by a guy named Valentin Howie.

Yeah, I don't even know. You shouldn't even try. H-A-U, umlaut, why? It's not Uter? No, it's umlaut. Oh, okay. He created a system that is basically kind of wavy, Latin characters.

Yeah. It looked very much like the characters that we use here in the West. Sure. But they were a little wavy or a little more elongated, I guess, ostentably so that you could feel them more easily. And still to this day, some people consider this type of tactile writing easier to learn.

Yeah, true. Very good point. Thanks. The thing is Braille eventually did catch on Chuck and these days, Louis Braille is looked upon in much the same way that Johann Gutenberg is. Yeah, sure. I think actually Helen Keller on the anniversary,

the 100th anniversary of Louis Braille's death said something along the lines of in our small way, we the blind are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg. Sure. He basically took a group of humans who were virtually unrecognized in the educational system and gave them a way to become educated people.

Right, literate, created literacy, both of them did. Yeah, among the blind. Yeah, and they both took a little while to catch on, largely because one of the reasons we said with the Braille was because they were competing codes, but they're also, the books, Braille books were really bulky and large. Still are.

Well, they still are, but back then, dude, it was even worse, like you didn't wanna be lugging around Braille books in your rucksack. No, and Tracy, who wrote this article is a huge Harry Potter fan. Indeed. She described how big Harry Potter and what the Half-Blood, something else, something.

I don't know. Whatever. Half-Blood prints. There you go. That Harry Potter book is 14 volumes long in its Braille edition. Wow. This long.

Yeah. And yeah, they're heavy. They have to be published using a loose leaf. Yeah, yeah. So that the, with a ring binder down the middle. Sure. So that the pages can sit flat so you can hit the cells all the way.

And I think actually Chuck, we may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. Let's talk about Braille at its basis. Okay. Like what it is, literally. Yes. Well, Josh, Louis Braille realized that the night writing method used cells to create an alphabet

using dots and dashes. Yeah, and originally Braille used dashes as well. Does not anymore. No. But the Braille cells today, they're a little bit different than the original Braille. They do not use dashes, like you said. They are two dots wide and three dots tall.

Right. At this point, I want everybody who's listening to this podcast to close your eyes. Okay. Okay. You have in your head a cell made up of six dots. Like Chuck just said, it's two dots across and three dots down in each of the columns, right?

So you have one, two, three dots down and to the next column to the right, you have one, two, three dots down. Now, if you go to the first dot on the first column, which would be the one on the left-hand side, that's the number one dot. Right. The one below that is two and then three at the top of the right-hand line of dots.

You have four and then five and then six. Using these six dots, you can create 63 character combinations. Correct, Josh, and you would think pretty easy because we've only got 26 letters in our alphabet, but they also have to cover punctuation, contractions, musical notes and symbols. Basically anything you can think of that you would be able

to read with your eyes, it needs to be accounted for within those Braille dots. Right, and there are some in the original Braille, the English Braille alphabet. Right. There is some punctuation included. Like close your eyes again, everybody. Go back to the Braille cell and think of it like a domino.

There's a rectangle with the dots inside. Okay. A dot in position two alone is a comma. So remember that's the middle one on the left-hand column. Okay. One that is the in position six alone is the capital sign. Right. So you put that before the next character

and you know that it's a capital letter. Yeah. And it just kind of goes on like this. Right, and you also have to represent the numbers too. We forgot to add. So zero through nine are represented and you can obviously make up any combination with those. And zero through nine are actually the same thing

as letters A through J. Yes. But before each number, you would have a number sign, much like you have a capital sign before the next letter. To indicate that it's a number. So the number sign is the third position. Right. And then four, five, and six.

And then you might have A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, or J. Yeah. And then that would be a number instead of a letter. It sounds so complicated. It does. But I imagine if you are looking at a book for the first time, I don't remember back that far. I'm glad you said that.

But if you're looking at a normal book, you're probably like, I couldn't think of anything more complicated than I have to do. Exactly. And that's the point. I'm glad you brought that up because they say that it is very much like learning to read and write for the first time, using the same pathways in the brain.

And should we talk about the Wonder Machine real quick since I brought that up? Yeah, this is really interesting. Yes, the fMRI, when people read Braille, their visual cortex, visual cortex, actually fires up. Yeah, and there's a couple of theories why. The first is that when you are blind, you have basically this storage area

that is put to use doing other stuff. Yeah, pretty cool. Right? Which would be tactile sensory input rather than visual sensory input. Right. And then the other theory, Chuck, is that the language processing centers

actually serve as holding areas for this tactile information. So cool, yeah. But because it's the brain, we really have no clue. We just know when it's firing up and when it's not. I've lost a tremendous amount of faith in the Wonder Machine, dude. Really?

Yeah, I read the study where this guy scanned a dead salmon while he showed it pictures of humans and asked them what emotions it was showing and he got a response on the MRI, yeah. That's disappointing. Yeah, it is. So moving on, Josh. A typical line of Braille is about 40 characters

and a typical page of Braille is about 25 lines. Right, so think about that. That domino, each domino is a character and in uncontracted Braille or grade one Braille, every word is spelled out letter by letter, which is why the Harry Potter book is 14 volumes long. Yeah, exactly. Right?

So to combat against this huge bulkiness, they've come up with contracted Braille. Yeah, grade two Braille. And this is when they group or they contract Braille literally using representations of whole words or letter combinations, we're like shorthand. Yeah, like ing or ed or thee or and, they have their own, rather than three cells for and,

you just have one in its and. Right, but there's a little controversy there as always. Some people say that uncontracted Braille is really important because it's a foundation for learning contracted Braille and opponents say that uncontracted Braille is time and space consuming and basically you just don't need to learn two codes. Right.

So why bother? That's a good question. I guess a good answer would be that what is the standard? What are you gonna encounter contracted or uncontracted when you're at the ATM machine? Yeah. And you're reading the keys, is that contracted or uncontracted?

I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly, it's uncontracted. Oh, is it? Because yeah, there's one dot at the number one position, et cetera. I can read that kind of Braille. Well, yeah. And actually when there's a great illustration

showing basic English, the English Braille alphabet and it seems like something you could pick up if you really set your mind to it. That'd be kind of cool. Should we talk more about how you read it? Like you read it from left to right, like a regular book, but you write it right to left, is that correct? Yeah, you have to, when you make the impression on the page,

you have to do it going from right to left because think about it, you're gonna be flipping the page over to read the bump. Pretty interesting. It is very interesting. Pretty clever. And you can do this handheld still with a stylus. Yeah, some books are translated from site books

to Braille by hand, which takes hundreds of hours. But that's not the way to do it anymore. I mean, you can, but there's different ways. Now you can get a Braille writer, which has a key for each of the six dots of a cell. Which makes sense. Makes sense. You can actually get a regular QWERTY keyboard

attached to a Braille printer. Right. Very easy to use. And what else, Josh? Well, if you want to read in the future. Right, which is now. There's movable type that reads a screen line by line. Yeah.

And there's, you have basically like a pad that has recessed pins that represent a dot, right? Pretty cool. And then based on what the line of text on the screen says, the corresponding dots pop up and you read them. And then as it goes down, they refresh and then pop up. Again, it's very motorized. Yeah, it's very cool.

I actually read an article about a NASA scientist who's figured out how to use, I think they're called like active polymers, artificial muscles basically, to create a very highly compressed, movable type Braille keyboard. Really? So you could apply it to the iPhone or whatever.

It looks like the future of it. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And then there are obviously, if you want to skirt around all the Braille, blind people use things like screen readers for their computer. Yeah.

To audio books, obviously. And recordings of lectures or friends and family letters from their friends and family. But I don't know if you remember, we did something on the webcast on a blind man being blind in modern society. And the New York Times and this guy was very anti all these readers.

He said it basically makes blind people lazy. And they need to get out and learn Braille just as you need to go out and learn how to read because you get a better understanding of a word if you understand how to spell it and write it. Right. And read it. And plus also, you use a different part of your brain

to process language orally than you do visually or tactily. Yeah. So I mean, there's like a whole part of your brain that would be underdeveloped and then just in and of itself is a bad idea. Yeah. I would think so. They also have, you can scan books now too.

That's one of the easier ways to translate now using optical character recognition technology. And you can scan a book and they can translate it into Braille for you. They mean it's computer. Well, you can send it to a Braille printer. Well, yeah. Sure.

I can understand though why somebody who is blind would want to, you know, listen to an audio book. Yeah, it's faster. It is faster. Apparently the average Braille reader can read at a rate of 125 to 200 words per minute. And by contrast, the average sighted eighth grader can read about 205 words per minute

and college students read about 280 words per minute. So if you're in college and you're blind, it's probably not even necessarily a question of laziness. It's a question of just trying to keep up. Right. You know? Sure. I'm a slow reader.

What about you? Very slow. Are you? Yeah. Interesting, I am too. Yeah. Like when I read a book, I call it deliberate. Yeah, I can.

Because people say you read slow, but I read very deliberately and I'll reread a sentence to get it just right. I'm not a scanner at all. No, I'm not either. And I say scanner stink. I do too, Chuck. These people that I see reading,

like you take these tests where you read, see how fast you can read reading comprehension. And I've done this on like people's blogs and people logged on and said they read this many words. And I literally did my eyes and time myself and it's, I can't even scan that fast. I don't see how they can be absorbing these words. They're probably not.

It's all just sitting there and working memory for a minute and then it's gone. I ingest it, buddy. I do too. Good for you. Like a pie. Like pie or like a pie? Like a whole pie.

Okay. I thought you meant like pie. So Chuck, still like we said, there's Braille all over the place. Many languages of Braille specific to that country. Yeah. Again, there's no universal Braille. There's not even a universal English Braille. The Braille in the UK and Wales

and the United States are all different. Well, yeah, they're different codes. And luckily we have the Braille authority of North America here in the US of A and they do publish standards for these codes, but you have to know what codes you're reading because the same cell can mean one thing in one code and something else in a different code.

Right. And also there's notations that there's Braille for music. Sure. English Braille, American edition is used for things like novels and magazines, basically literature, right? Right. Then you have the Nemeth code of Braille, mathematics and scientific notation for math and science.

Sure. Because I mean, think about Sigma. There's nothing in the English alphabet that signifies Sigma. Right. And that thing pops up a lot and terrifies me whenever I see it in an equation. Me too.

Then you've got computer Braille code, code for ASCII. ASCI, aka to ASCII. Right. And chemical notations in music, right? Right. So the whole point of these standard authorities is to bring all this together so that their unsighted people in their country

can all know what the hell they're reading. Right. And they're, like we said, every country literally has their own Braille. There's even Chinese Braille with the characters representing sounds that make up the language. Yeah. Hebrew Braille, Josh as well,

which sounds like the grade one Braille with each letter and number representing its own cell. Right. And then of course, Chuck, there's the newest Braille alphabet, which is Tibetan. Welcome Tibetan Braille to the family. A woman named Sebri Tenberkin created the code so that she could read Tibetan manuscripts.

And she realized that she had just created a new Braille language and took it to Tibet and started teaching blind Tibetan children. That's awesome. Tibetan Braille. So you could literally invent a Braille method if you wanted to. Oh, I have.

Oh, really? Yeah. Josh Braille. Yeah. And you know, they're still working on this. Many countries have agencies and departments that evaluate their own codes and try and institute or implement new improvements in technology,

that kind of thing. Like this one I saw, I don't understand the benefit here. So there's a new display prototype that can be rolled up like paper. Yeah. Do we still do scrolls? Who does that?

I think that's on its way out. Yeah. With the refreshable type. Aside from your diploma and what else? A poster of, you know. Anything that has to do with papyrus. Right. It's really scrolled, you know, silk.

That kind of thing. I guess that's a good thing. And then Braille libraries, web Braille libraries. Right. Available online. So it seems like Braille is everywhere, right? Sure. I'll tell you one place it's not,

in the United States. I don't know, it's just the fact of the day. Our currency. Yeah. Chuck, out of 180 countries in the world that use paper currency, the United States is the only one that makes its paper currency the same size

and the same shape, regardless of denomination. If you are blind, you have to come up with your own clever tricks to keep track of it. And you're, although it probably rarely happens, you're constantly under threat of being ripped off. Because you have no idea. You just know you have a paper bill. It could be a one or a hundred.

You have no clue. True. They fold the paper, the bills. Isn't that one of the tricks? That is one trick. And there is a big debate even within blind advocacy groups of whether or not the US should go to the trouble of putting any kind of tactile imprint on their currency.

Or should blind people just make do, you know? But I'm getting you a gift, Chuck. Oh, no, what? I went on to Amazon and I found this thing called the pocket brailer. OK. And it hooks on your key chain. And it has one, two, three, four, five.

It has six little notches. OK. And you put the corner of your paper currency into the appropriate notch. So if it's a one, you put it in the one notch. And you press down. And you can actually emboss. You can braille your currency.

That's a great idea. Not for yourself. But if a blind person ever comes in contact with it, they have it already brailed for them. So if everyone got these and did this to the dollars that flow their way, eventually we could have enough money out there where we've done it ourselves. Yeah.

I mean, think about it. Forget the government. Every time you came in contact with a piece of paper currency, you marked it, forgot about it, got back into circulation, that kind of gets around. You know what I say to that? What? Putta, putta, putta.

Nice. So I'm going on to Amazon. It's actually from a site called MaxiAid, which is a very unfortunate name for a website. But they sell the pocket brailer for $6.79. And I'm getting you one, buddy. Really? I'm getting myself one, too.

That's pretty cool. All right. Well, if everyone else out there got them, then maybe we could make a real difference in this world. I agree. Of course, the blind people would have to know that this movement is going on. Not necessarily.

I think that they were marked correctly. Well, that's the kind of thing. I mean, I'm sure there's a jerk out there who will do it the opposite way. Right. And that person's going to hell anyway, so. Yeah, good point. Yeah.

Threefold. Remember the witch's rule of three. Right. Come back on your head three times, buddy. If you want to read more about Braille, you can type that word, B-R-A-I-L-L-E, into the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com, which leads us, of course, to Listener Mail.

Yes, Josh. Anyone out there who listens to this much of the show and listens to Listener Mail? All eight of you. They know two things. We love email from our young friends. Yes. And we love email in broken English.

And we love free stuff. And this is both. Actually, not all three. This is not free stuff. This is, I'm going to call this, Broken English, from young Lucy. Young Lucy will just call it that. The cutest recent immigrant in the United States.

This is great. And of course, as we always like to COA and say, we're not making fun of anyone, this is doing a great job of writing in English, and we just think it's a good time. Hello, Josh and Chuck, from the podcast. I am 14 years of age, and I enjoy to listen to the podcast plenty. It's a good start.

I write this on friends' email, due to the fact that I myself do not have email. I write another before, but is not certain if it arrived to the dwelling of you, so I write again. I love the podcast and the joke you say, make I laughing so hard. That's good, so she thinks you're funny. I try hard on English, but it's still no good.

Josh and Chuck help plenty, and I find I learn new thing every one of the days. That is awesome. So she's learning things all the time from us. She should, her parents should probably be afraid. Probably so. I come to Canada, from China, and like to live here. Every day here is joyous, and all people are happy,

and also kind. That's about right for Canada. She must be in Vancouver. My mother jokes that I am too much in interest with podcasts, and says she is wondering if I am in love with podcast Josh. I respond with wholehearted no, and declare him to married, and he much too old for my young and small age 14. Very true.

That is a good girl. Josh is not married, though, we should say. I listen to old podcast with Chris, and I'm wondered, why oh why Chris does Josh work? Is Chris slave? Lavery not accepted in Canada, neither should in USA. Agreed. Agreed.

I love to hear you, and good day to you. I try hard to write this, and I'm hoping happiness and health for you from your fan number one, Lucy. Goodbye, no you slave. Lucy, I am not married. I am very much taken. But I got to tell you, if I weren't, I would wait for you. You sound like a very.

She is quite a charmer. Passionate, charming, and lean. Yeah. And welcome to Canada. Can I speak for Canadians? I guess. Welcome to Canada. We do here in the US anyway.

And thanks for listening, Lucy. That's really very, very cute. Agreed. So if you have a super heartbreakingly cute email that you want to send us, you know we like those a lot. We're suckers for them. You just wrap it up, send it along to Stuff Podcast at howstuffworks.com.

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