HEARING BRAILLE

Being blind involves much more than just living without sight. Further investigation of Braille as a model of the relationship between objects and spaces lead me to the idea of creating a device that explores the experience of using Braille. I wanted to simulate the experience of reading Braille for those with sight. I created a Braille sensor that reads a line of text in phonetic sounds when scanned with a finger. I see this type of device as tool to inform the design of experiences—particularly from alternative perspectives.

ASSIGNMENT: Communicate the words "object" and "system" using interaction as a medium.
MAKING: I wanted the device to be as minimal as possible to avoid it influencing the experience if hearing Braille. The device was simple, a ribbon touch sensor attached to a block of wood painted white. To the top I attached a paper with the phrase, "A small area raised above the level of the surrounding surface," written in Braille. The difficult part of making this device was crafting the sound of the phrase into syllables that became understandable as a whole. I soon found that there are multiple ways to pronounce the vowel "a" beyond even the sounds we are taught. Each vowel sound is a blend of the letters that surround it. This differs from Braille, in which each letter is read independent of the letters that surround it. Words in Braille are then composed to form words rather than being read as a whole. However, I'm told that experienced Braille readers can scan words with all the fingertips of a hand and read in a similar fashion to the way we read words.