0LAUK0 PRE2018 3 Group 13 SotA Literature Study
Introduction
This page contains the State-of-the-Art literature study performed by group 13 for the course Project Robots Everywhere (0LAUK0). Here we have listed relevant topics to our main research subject. Each topic has its own summary and list of references.
Summaries
Braille system
In 1821, Barbier de la Serre invented Braille. Which got a then twelve-year-old blind student Louis Braille very excited. The system wasn’t like the Braille we know today, it used 12 dots and and every character described sounds. Louis Braille worked on la Serre’s system for several years and improved it to how we know it today. He changed the characters to 6 dots and instead of sounds, it describes glyphs (eg. letters, numbers) [1].
The number of people that use Braille has been a long-term decline. In the UK, there are two million visually impaired people, of which the majority is over 65 years old [2]. Fewer than 1% of the two million visually impaired people are users of Braille (18-20,000). Braille users typically are those who have not been able to see from an early age. Only 2,000 people regularly order books from the Braille library, which suggests most people only use it for practical reasons rather than entertainment.
The braille system consists of evenly arranged dots in quadrangular letter spaces, called cells. A full cell is three dots high and two dots wide. Only 63 different characters can be formed. Braille uses a fixed-width font, which means that every character occupies the same amount of space regardless of the amount of dots in the cell. Although the standards for creating braille differ per country, the American National Standard: Accessible and Usable Buildings and Facilities: 2003: Standard and Commentary, Section 703.4 details a range of standards in an effort to improve readability [3].
References
Braille system
- History of Braille. Available at: https://typeculture.com/academic-resource/articles-essays/braille-tactile-writing-system/
- Popularity of Braille in the U.K. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16984742
- National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress. Specification 800: Braille Books and Pamphlets. Available at: http://www.loc.gov/nlsold/specs/800_march5_2008.pdf