technology Braille

Posted June 21, 2005 • Comments Off on Braille

There’s this woman who rides the same train as I do sometimes. She wears nice matching outfits and tinted glasses. She usually spends the first half of the trip reading on her PDA and the second half talking on her cell phone.

Her dog, a golden retriever, usually stays curled up behind her legs.

And this is what her PDA looks like.

Productimages Pamteunitblue
http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/PACmate_bns.asp

Hers is clearly an older model (beige, not gray; serial, not USB, though it does have a Compact Flash card reader), but this is what it is.

Obviously, the lady I see on the train is blind. I spend a good deal of time watching her when I see her; everyone does, and it’s not like she knows, and if she somehow caught me I’d readily have a hundred perfectly polite things to say, but I still feel a little guilty about it. The fact is, though, to watch her clearly doing the same things I do, down to looking up a phone number and dialing it on her cell phone, is fascinating. She works for a nonprofit, but I’m not sure which one. I’ve heard her talk in government acronyms (DOE, RFP, and so on), setting up meetings and planning to go over documents at home at night.

This eight-button PDA is one of the most beautifully apt pieces of technology I’ve ever seen, and its operation is completely opaque to me. What does its interface ‘look’ like to her, in her mind? Does she use an organizational system different from what you or I would? Does she keep the numbers in the Braille thing because there’s really no point to programming them into her phone like I do? How does the machine hook up to her computer at home? Does she have a special keyboard, or does she touch-type on a regular qwerty or Dvorak one? If so, are there Braille letters and numbers on the keys? How does a Braille display render things like windows, dialog boxes, nested menus, and so on? Is the interface completely different? If so, is there special software—above and beyond screenreaders like Jaws—to translate a graphical user interface into text? How descriptive is the text? Has she learned, or invented, or taught herself, a system of codes and abbreviations to figure these things out?

I think about these things while I watch her on the train.