Yes, they do, using "refreshable braille displays", hardware devices containing a strip of retractable braille pins, allowing braille characters to be generated on the fly.

Link for more knowledge: http://www.id-book.com/preece/whatisitlike.html .

I know and have worked with several people that are blind from a Social Security manager to an engineer for AT&T to attorneys for the State Department and the State of Florida. I help people with disabilities set up businesses.

Most common way to access the internet is JAWS software.

http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp

or uses a Mac which has a pretty good screen reader. I have never encountered a braille display.

It is important to have the web pages planned for accessibility. There is software that will check accessibility factors and software that will help program tags and explanations the JAWS software can recognize.

http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/04/2011 04:03PM by Jim Huston.

I have seen playboy and hustler braile equality for the blind.

Maybe he'll show up and give us the low down!

I've been away from this board for a while and had not noticed this posting until today.

Most of the answers you have received are quite good and correct. I was especially impressed with Jim Huston's, but I must tell you, Jim, that I am using a Focus-40 braille display supported by JAWS on top of JAWS' speech access. The two main reasons that you probably don't see too many blind people with braille displays is 1) the expense of the displays (I paid $4000 for my 40-cell; the 80-cell one comes for around $8000--prices that many blind people cannot afford); and 2) the lack of training in how to read Braille by many young blind people.

Regarding the questions about whether Playboy and Hustler are available in Braille, the answers are "yes" and "no". Playboy is one of the general interest magazines made available through the national Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS), a part of the Library of Congress. A scandal was created in the 1980s when a Christian Republican representative from Ohio got passed a bill that outlawed NLS' making Playboy available to the blind, because he believed it served prurient interests (a Federal District court eventually overturned the ban, saying that it violated the First Amendment's clauses guaranteeing freedom of speech and establishment of religion).

Hustler has never been made available in Braille. The costs-versus-potential profits of producing Braille magazines for a minority of people who are mostly unemployed and have little spending money leave the publishing of magazines in Braille outside of the NLS in the hands of a few non-profit mostly religious groups. If memory serves (and I will have to look this up sometime--but I probably won't), I believe your former church does make two or three of its magazines available in Braille.

In the past two years I have helped three businesses get started where the owner is blind. One business was a business converting restaurant menus to Braille. The second was a business which evaluated overall accessibility for restaurants. The third was helping an attorney get his business going. I know this is not a lot, but I don't provide that much direct service.

Howdy, BG: nice to see your comment.

As soon as I saw the original post, I was expecting a response from yourself.

You said, "I paid $4000 for my 40-cell; the 80-cell one comes for around $8000--prices that many blind people cannot afford."


That is a hell of a lot of money to pay for specialized "display device" - I suppose, unfortunately, that there are insufficient numbers produced to bring the cost down?

And I never really thought about this - but is text-to-speech a more or less satisfactory way to access information, than Braille?

It's far cheaper although its on the expensive side aswell.

Well, I meant the experience itself: if everything is audio does that become tedious? And Braille less so?


I guess I would find audio-only tedious myself.

It dosent come in that format but you can get the mentiond desplays.

Better to aceess the internet useing a text to speech program but it has it's own dissadvantages.

Text to speech plus a computer that can run it is very expensive plus depending on the hardware (speakers or a good pair of headphones) People can listen in.

if your asking on behalf of a blind person who's looking to study the mormon church you might need to be carful about what you sudgest as mormons always seem to keep thair computers in thair front rooms it might be set up so everyone can hear the pages as they are being read out. I knew one family that made sure thair kid kept the letters to te significant other nice and clean.

3X:

1) Actually, the prices for Braille displays have come down a little bit. During the 1990s when I was working for a hotel franchising outfit, the state vocational rehabilitation agency paid for me to have a Braille display on the computer I was using at work. That was a 40-cell display, and, at that time (the tail end of 1990), the cost was about $7000 for a 40-cell display and around $11,000 for an 80-cell display. The biggest factor in the costs of Braille displays is the cost of the Piezo pins that quickly move up and down to create the Braille characters as your computer screen and/or cursor focus change. For the record, most blind people who do get Braille displays get them from their state vocational rehabilitation agencies to use at work.

2) With regard to the cost of JAWS and other screenreading software, you are looking at around $800 or so. The speech in the software program can be sped up or slowed down, and many blind people find it easier to work with speech that sounds like gobbledy-gook to other sighted people listening. Once JAWS is purchased, the blind person can figure on spending around $200 every two years or so if he wants to keep downloading the latest version (new versions with major changes are introduced once annually with minor updates being sent several times a year).

3) Text-to-speech software can be very useful, especially if you have problems using a keyboard. That said, text-to-speech programs (such as Drag-n-Speak) have a big problem: they do not accurately interpret the person's voice 100% of the time (though they are getting better at it). This means that for a blind person to utilize a text-to-speech program, he/she still needs screenreading software (like JAWS) to let him/her know that what was spoken to the text-to-speech software has been translated correctly by the program.

Thats american prices not english ones trust me the price of a computer to take it and jaws is to much for alot of them.

Yes, one can read the Internet in braille...

http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?DocumentID=4249&SectionID=7&SubTopicID=127&TopicID=330

The main problem with this is that many web sites are not written for such devices.

Any significant site has the text backing up any graphics or buttons. The people who are blind is too large a group to ignore. My websites are not great, but even they have tags for Jaws. They have all the tags recommended for Wc3 accessibility. I designed and wrote the sites myself. This is not rocket science and there is a lot of software to help in the process. BTW I am not a computer guy, I am an accountant and run a one man consulting business. My main business site was reviewed by people I know who are blind before I published it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/14/2011 06:39AM by Jim Huston.

But, from time to time I use lynx, a text based browser and I gotta tell you, there are a lot of sites that are impossible to navigate. Some biggies that people would expect to be better included.

text only is diffrent from text with jawas tags.

But alot of sites dont have the tags so yourabout 99 percent right.

When I used to build websites I put alt text behind every graphic becaues I knew it would read that in most screen readers.

blindguy, thanks for the info. Being able to read is just something I take for granted.

I have helped people who are legally blind with their computer before, and it was very rewarding. I basically showed them how to use the accessibility features in Windows. What that really did was make the letters really big. So even though the person was legally blind, she could still read if the letters were large.

When I worked for a computer company, we had software that would read web pages, but it was hard for the sighted to set up. We also worked on text to speech software, but it was the early stages.

I hope things get easier. I can see how not seeing could limit people. What kinds of work do the blind do?

This thread has been very educational, by the way.

T-Bone:

I liked your response, and I'm glad you got to work with some partially sighted people in the past.

Regarding your question, while blind and partially sighted people can perform many functions with the same results as the sighted, their means for getting the job done can be vastly different, especially if you are totally blind as I am. This difference in means has often led to job discrimination, because many sighted people do not have the imagination to figure out how a particular job can be performed by a person who doesn't have sight. So the sighted people often write the job descriptions and requirements with the intent of excluding blind candidates without saying that blind people are excluded (that would be a no-no under current U.S. laws).

As to the kinds of jobs available, Jim Huston (see above) is right. If you have no sight but a lot of intelligence, you could become a blind attorney (I know a few in the field) or a blind business owner (usually, but not always, selling to the blindness community). As the result of a 1936 law updated in 1974, the visually impaired get first option to bid on vending facilities and cafeteeria operations in Federal buildings (I actually trained for this; however, health issues and a lack of interest forced me to drop it). I do know quite a few blind teachers who work both in private and public (mostly the latter) school settings, and I have heard of a few college professors who are blind. There are many blind people, who like my brother, become family or disability counselors. Many blind people who have neither the intellegence nor the drive (and who have other issues) wind up working as phone operators at hotel franchising outfits (my first job) and various sales and marketing firms that call unsuspecting people on the telephone. I know a blind person who was a stockbroker (he was forced out in 2001 or 2002, long before the 2008 economic slump) who now works as a piano tuner (there is a school in the state of Washington, the Emil B. Fries Piano Institute, that trains blind piano tuners). And, of course, yours truly is employed as a Braille proofreader at one of the state universities.

In short, blind people can perform many functions. What keeps more of them from being hired are 1) lack of imagination by the sighted who might otherwise hire them; 2) lack of training by the blind in the specific areas being sought; 3) lack of confidence in their own abilities by blind people; 4) the expense of some of the equipment blind people have to use and who's going to pay for it; and 5) the lack of available public transportation, especially in smaller towns.

I used to date in braille. My dates got offended when I tried to figure out their name by feeling them up.