Why does Braille use raised bumps instead of raised letters?

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Why not just use the original letters?

In: Technology

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’m not a specialist, but there could be multiple reasons :
It’s easier to recognize a pattern of dots than to recognize a series of straight and curved lines like in a letter.
The Braille letters each have the same width while alphabet letters do not. It’s easier to know when a letter starts and stops.
It’s also much easier to engrave dots on a sheet of paper than regular letters.
Finally, I’d say it’s easier to write Braille letters than to write regular letters if you’re Braille, but I’m not sure about that one.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pattern isn’t that clear to read from a letter and different fonts would use different ridge detail this way the pattern is set, standardised and easy to identify.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Letters and numbers share shapes that are easily mistaken for one another ( 6 G , W VV , O D , etc.). Braille has been set up in a way that minimizes risk of mismatched characters.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Originally, raised letters is exactly what they had. It was very difficult to produce them–basically no quick way to handwrite them. It was hard to read them–letter shapes are optimized for writing with a pen and reading with eyes. Blind people have a totally different use case.

Louis Braille was fed up with how bad that system was for blind people, and decided to create his own system that was easy for *him* to read and write. The system of raised dots poked through with an awl was what he came up with, and it was a dramatic improvement for reading speed and ease of writing. It was so much better that it caught on quickly with other blind people around him (they were basically grouped together in a hospital for blind people who were otherwise a bit helpless in a society prior to accessibility law).

Raised letters was the solution that seeing people came up for blind people. Braille was a solution that came from a blind person who actually understood the use case. It’s not all that different in concept from the invention of sports bras that actually worked by women, and other cases where it turns out people who actually need to use the thing have the best idea of how it should work.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Short answer is that would be confusing and hard to read quickly. Here is a c for example, no actually it’s an o, you didn’t go all the way around it.