Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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This Text to Braille Converter Could Revolutionize Life for the Visually Impaired (thebossmagazine.com)
submitted by fastfinge
dmazzoni 3 points 6y ago
It's great to see a group of smart young people working on braille devices, and I hope they succeed!
I just wish for once a company making braille tech didn't pretend they invented the refreshable braille display.
Could they be improved? Absolutely. But this company didn't invent it and most likely at best they will make a modest incremental improvement over what's out there.
I just wish for once a company making braille tech didn't pretend they invented the refreshable braille display.
Could they be improved? Absolutely. But this company didn't invent it and most likely at best they will make a modest incremental improvement over what's out there.
fastfinge [OP] 1 points 6y ago
To be fair, I'm not sure how much of that is misquoting by the magazine. Online journalism today needs quick, simple stories like "invented this" instead of "improved this thing nobody has heard of".
theaggravatedjew 2 points 6y ago
Seems like a very small amount of braille text and potentially difficult to appropriately align and less efficient than an OCR or KNFB reader. But, uh cool, I guess.
jofish22 2 points 6y ago
Wouldn't text-to-speech be (literally) ten times more useful?
fastfinge [OP] 2 points 6y ago
Not for the deaf blind. And it depends what you're reading. Text to speech sucks for math, crosswords (or anything where the exact position of letters matters like charts), and several other things. And it isn't available in all languages.
jofish22 2 points 6y ago
Fair enough. I would be surprised if their device does particularly well on any of those edge cases either, but perhaps we'll be surprised.
fastfinge [OP] 1 points 6y ago
Well, I suspect it would do better than nothing at all, and that's what exists right now for at least one of those edge cases. But you're right, that if you can use text to speech, you probably should. It's cheaper and faster. But there are a lot of areas where that's just not an option.
dmazzoni 1 points 6y ago
Don't forget programming! Also taking notes quietly
fastfinge [OP] 1 points 6y ago
Programming, sure. But taking notes quietly? Unless you're using a slate, Braille will always be much louder than speech through headphones. Braillers are loud, and so are Braille keyboards.
tymme 1 points 6y ago
This Clickbbaity Headline Probably Won't Get Clicked by Many Redditors.
fastfinge [OP] 2 points 6y ago
All articles about blind people in mainstream sources are clickbait, inspiration porn, or both. I just post them to get the discussion going.
tymme 2 points 6y ago
Sorry, my cynicism clouded usual judgement and I figured this was some random person posting their new invention. While innovation is good, I feel like half the posts in this sub are becoming "I think you need this, but I don't actually want to deal with you until halfway through the project". Not laziness, just ... insincere? Feeding stereotypes? Not sure what word/phrase I'm looking for.
fastfinge [OP] 1 points 6y ago
I think the phrase you might be looking for is "school project". They don't want to hear anything that might make them rethink the project, and thus make more work, or risk the grade.
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