Click all you want on any image.
Okay, pizza all around, and some for myself. An astonishingly big number of Vleeptron's readers have skills and familiarity with Braille. I am not one of them. My Mom taught me the rudiments and the basic scheme, and lots of interesting stuff, but my practical knowledge of Braille is very much like my practical knowledge of packing parachutes. Who wants one of my parachutes?
But loitering around in the clinic's patient examination area, I transcribed the Braille dots on my door as best as I could, with no template (2.) to guide me.
Agence-Vleeptron Presse's Alps Correspondent has filed the very interesting top two images, which he found while searching for his social security card and a John Coltrane CD. They are souvenirs of his job at a school for the blind.
At the bottom, back to the trouble with the PizzaQ. I could fix it simply. All I have to do is drive 25 miles south, and ask the clinic receptionist if it would be okay if I wandered back to the examining rooms with my digital camera. I'm sure she'll be happy to accomodate me.
But until then ... surprisingly, the guesses have been pretty goddam close to what the sign is supposed to say. It was announcing that this is Exam Room B3, or 3B, or something like that. Everybody just shut up for a couple of months until my next appointment, to which I will smuggle in my digital camera, and settle this mess once and for all.
But indeed, this is the most compressed of Braille's three "tiers." It's on every door as a blind patient wanders unsupervised through the hall trying to find a specific exam room. Works perfectly, and a lot of sight-challenged people would indeed prefer finding their way this way rather than be guided by a sighted person.
3 comments:
Braille is quite easy to learn, I got the visual part in about 30 minutes, and I am certainly not one of the brightest lights in the universe. Physically learning Braille with your fingers is a totally different matter which will take you months if not years, I never got past the visual part and forgot most of it after i quit that job
Braille was originally intended as a military code, there is a pattern in the structure which may not be clear at first in this tab. but if you look from top to bottom and not from left to right you should see the pattern allright. Fairly easy and, like most of those things, genius
there are 2 versions of Braille, the actual alphabet and a sort of shorthand similar to stenography. Most textbooks are written in shorthand, otherwise there would be several thick volumes of just one thin textbook. And they differ in different languages, this tab is german braille, american english long or shorthand may be completely different from german shorthand. Same thing with Sign language fromn what I remember btw
I am not an expert on the subject, I quit that job about 8 years ago, but even back then the gadgets they had at the office were amazing, scanners that could read out printed matters of all sorts to you, even things like phone bills and tax forms through a speech synthesizer, talking watches and cellphones, web page readers etc
At that time when i was doing my job those developments had just started, the age of the Internet had just dawned, it would be interesting to see what kind of nifty gadgets are out there nowdays
the social security card including my social security number was successfully located (yay), the John Coltrane CD (A Love Supreme, Trane in conversation with the universe) must be around here somewhere.....
On "Love, Devotion, Surrender," John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana do a cover of "A Love Supreme" that totally rocks my world. McLaughlin plays guitar on two of Miles Davis' albums from the 1960s, including "Bitches Brew."
Seems interesting..
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