Thread by @ChanceyFleet

Happy Blindness Awareness Month!
Braille was invented in 1824 by a Blind student at a French school that taught raised print (slow to read, produced only with a press).
Sighted teachers didn't want students reading and writing Braille. So, they burned it.
pri.org/stories/2018-0…

Boston Line Type and other raised-print systems were promoted by sighted educators for decades after Braille was refined.
These shapes can't be written by hand,
are larger than Braille,
and take longer to decode than a Braille cell's elegant 6-dot binary.
touchthispage.com

As consumer technology has evolved in the last fifty years or so, Braille has come unbound from the book.
A digital Braille display uses an array of pins to raise Braille characters, usually a line at a time, like a literary infinite scroll game.
theguardian.com/society/2012/f….

Some Braille displays are tiny: I have a 14-cell that fits in a small handbag (and I won't leave home without a way to read: I'd sooner forget my shoes.
Others are larger, like the Canute, which uses a rotating rack-and-pinion system to offer 9 lines.
perkinselearning.org/technology/pos…

Braille also lives on signs, L'Occitane En Provence products, playing cards, Scrabble boards, wine bottles and Pourfect nested measuring cups.
Combine it with raised lines at the right scale, and you've got beautiful nonvisual street maps.
lighthouse-sf.org/tmap/

Some sighted folks, though, still want to burn it all down.
Every year there's a think piece about whether Braille (so rapidly evolved in its 196 years when compared to thousands of years of print) is "dying".
Because of technology: because our computers can talk to us now.

Sighted folks will write about this in a both-sides style.
Sighted rehab teachers will warn adult learners that Braille is hard, slow, maybe unnecessary.
I've never met a sighted person, though, who has surrendered the pleasure of print for the convenience of text-to-speech.

Stand up for Braille.
If someone you know is newly blind or headed that way, encourage them to try it out.
Yes learning as an adult is harder, but Braille isn't uniquely hard: it's like learning an instrument: it takes practice.
Here's a free way to learn.
hadley.edu/workshops/brai…

Blind people do use text-to-speech in addition to Braille: sometimes it's faster.
But one doesn't replace the other, any more than we decide whether to be a pedestrian or a cyclist.
Braille is not dying. It's still in its youth.
But it definitely needs better health insurance.