Comments on: Braille Bibles

Braille Bibles

Sully — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:21:46 -0800

The Bumpy Yet Finger-tingling Road to God Arriving in 17 volumes, and taking up 76 inches of shelf space, who needs the mp3? These nice folk print and distribute Bibles in braille. (Please use this link for good and not evil. Abuse this service and go directly to Hell. Do not pass Purgatory. Go directly to Hell.)

By: quarsan

quarsan — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:28:15 -0800

and..... what's the point of this post?

By: unsupervised

unsupervised — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:31:40 -0800

I guess this means Jesus isn't going to heal these people any time soon.

By: dios

dios — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:32:21 -0800

Is there where we display our outrage and mock Christians for having a braille version of their book? (And what's with the italicized part?)

By: caddis

caddis — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:34:22 -0800

I never really contemplated how truly large a braille bible would be before - 17 volumes! Nice charity.

By: Pretty_Generic

Pretty_Generic — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:35:05 -0800

The irony is, there is no god.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:47:36 -0800

What? A post about Christianity, with.... nothing to argue about?! This must be a mistake! (Neat post. Thanks!)

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:51:35 -0800

(And what's with the italicized part?) I think the point is you could say you were blind and have them send you a free braille bible, so it's an odd way of saying "be cool" I think. I took off the last bold BIBLES IN BRAILLE part for readability's sake.

By: dios

dios — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 07:57:56 -0800

Ahh. Gotcha. As a side note, how does a blind person read a website anyhow?

By: NinjaPirate

NinjaPirate — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 08:06:54 -0800

screen-readers can verbalise text on the screen for the sight-impaired. (JAWS, Window-Eyes) For the visually acute, they're used to narrate the lyrics of Straight Outta Compton

By: Jon-o

Jon-o — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 08:42:25 -0800

They really are huge books. When I saw them, at first I guessed that they were some sort of encyclopedia set or some huge illuminated text. This sort of thing as been around for a while, though. My future grandfatherinlaw does a lot of work with the American Council of the Blind (being blind himself). They're the folks who work to get braille signage on elevators, restrooms, and ATMs, as well as getting a voiceover to accompany the Weather Channel forecasts, and a number of other things. Although I can't find a link for it, there's a resource for blind folks who want to enjoy films. It's the audio track from the film and a voiceover description of the action. It's like a book-on-tape and a radio-play simultaneously. I think it's called either (obviously) Movies for the Blind or DescribeMovies.

By: redsparkler

redsparkler — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 08:56:58 -0800

Yeah. Braille books are pretty big. You should have seen the last Harry Potter in Braille. Huge.

By: raedyn

raedyn — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:00:21 -0800

Good that the service is available to those who want it. As an aside: I think the last part of the FPP (the 'threatening' part in italics) is just asking for trouble. It would never occur to me to abuse the link - until you try to invoke some threats that I lend no credence to in order to control my behaviour. My immediate reaction is to look for a way to mess with it. I didn't, but surely I'm not the only one who had that reaction, and it's possible that not every MeFite has the same level of self-control, or same sense of decency. Perhaps it was meant to be funny? I dunno, just seems like a dumb move to me. Hope it doesn't cause problems.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:10:14 -0800

Couldn't they save paper by translating the text into dot and dash tones, so the blind could simply hear the Braille?

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:18:25 -0800

Braille != morse code

By: substrate

substrate — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 09:28:45 -0800

dios, there are more than enough reasons to mock you without delving into religion. I'm mocking you right now, inside, where it counts.

By: leotrotsky

leotrotsky — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 10:23:30 -0800

wgp wins

By: quarsan

quarsan — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:37:28 -0800

don't get me wrong, it is great that the bible is avaliable as a braille book and as an mp3 (god wants you to share files), but what is noteworthy about this?

By: Balisong

Balisong — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:33:42 -0800

As a side note, I play everquest with a blind guy all the time.

By: Sixtieslibber

Sixtieslibber — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 20:16:16 -0800

"As a side note, how does a blind person read a website anyhow?" A braille user can use a refreshable braille display as a monitor.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:42:32 -0800

Sixtieslibber: Okay, so, why don't they read the BIBLE with a "refreshable braille display" ? Seriously: I saw a braille Bible way back when I was a computer science student in the dark ages. I thought, "Digitize!". I figured a bunch of solenoids under a latex membrane would do the job. Suddenly that huge Bible became a few tapes (I said it was long ago). So why the books? Terribly expensive to print and distribute. Not easy to carry around so you can thump it.

By: alasdair

alasdair — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 06:30:59 -0800

How blind people read: 1 Traditional technologies - Braille books. Familiar, simple, but bulky and difficult to transport, and not much stuff made available in this format. - Audio recordings. Familiar, simple, but not much stuff made available in this format. Only about 5% of all printed material is ever made available in an accessible format, and that usually much later. 2 New technologies based on computers: - Computer plus Braille line. These produce Braille characters on a dynamic line (little pegs pop up) so you can read whole electronic texts. Very expensive: think thousands of dollars. New technology, need to be tech-savvy. - Computer plus speech synthesizer. Speaks text aloud. Can be very expensive (thousands of dollars again) but [blatant self-plug] inexpensive screen readers like LookOUT are available [end of blatant self-plug]. (Warning: lots of politics around screen reader use and pricing) Obvious problems with speech synthesis, e.g. "Yesterday I read that you can't read, St. John of John St: how does this affect the UN, EU and NATO?" but they're getting pretty good. If you're looking at web pages you can use a screen reader (what's on the screen is spoken or fed to a Braille line) or a dedicated application like [plug again] WebbIE, the web browser for blind and visually-impaired people. (Other accessible browsers) So why have Braille books? Well, why do you have books? Why not put them all on your iPaq? Same reasons of portability, reliability, convenience, readability all apply. The electronic solutions come into their own when you are trying to do something about the limited availability of alternative Braille or audio formats. That's another reason the Web is great: billions of documents that should all be accessible text. Create a web page yourself? Make sure it is accessible. Or blind people will be stuck with the Braille Bible, and they'll all vote Republican, and as a MeFites you wouldn't want that, would you?