Why that braille printer isn't worth a penny
Thu, Feb. 13th, 2014 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jesse_the_k posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
access_fandomIt IS exciting to see kids interested in engineering, and I know selkiechick posted with the best intention.
However, that announcement pushed a whole row of my Assistive Technology Geek buttons, and I gotta rant. I'll can use the "BRAIGO" to illustrate why I get so hot under the collar. (My cred: I've hung out with people who use assistive technology since 1982; I designed and sold braille translation software and embossers in the late eighties; and I've personally depended on assistive technology since 1991.) Based on thirty year's close attention to the development/PR/funding/purchasing/abandonment cycle for assistive technology, here's my take on the BRAIGO announcement.
We're familiar with that trope, "the poor disabled person needs an AB person to show that life is worth living"? This attitude underlies a long-standing, and disturbing, pattern when it comes to the design, engineering, and most especially PR about assistive technology. Inventive able-bodied people too often think the issue with assistive technology is that nobody's thought deeply about how to fix our problems. After all, we're disabled, we couldn't possibly have the answers to our own needs. Since the issue is "deep insight," you'd think the next step would be contacting and consulting with end users, but this is almost never the case. Similar attitudes support the assumption that designing for people with disabilities is a charitable move. These tasks are often put to beginning designers, folks who are least aware that the simplest tool is embedded in complex culture.
The BRAIGO design shows profound ignorance of how people create and read braille, and the designer never mentions any interaction with blind people. The designer says on his Facebook site "it requires 10-15 seconds to make one braille letter" (actually, they're called "cells.") The BRAIGO embosses one cell per line on the same paper that's used for cash register receipts, which isn't strong enough to hold a braille dot for very long. Since braille format information is conveyed through printing characters (like asterisks and underlines in email), a single cell line can't have any format information. That's why the BRAIGO can't create useful braille.
When I contacted the designer, he wrote BRAIGO is "a proof of concept and with the design and code to be made public, the idea is anybody can use it and enhance." In other words, more people can spend time playing with a device that produces almost unreadable, unstoreable, unformatted braille. No research or knowledge about actual braille production seems to be part of the package. The designer's best output right now is public relations. The device is a one-off prototype, and the designer never plans a shipping product. Every accolade this young man receives also spreads misinformation.
The headline "embossers, once $2000, now $350" is popping up like fireflies on 1000s of sites. Now imagine when a braille user goes to the boss for a embosser. "How much are we looking at?" the boss asks. The employee replies, "For a decent one, $5000." The boss says, "But I read about one that costs $350 on Upworthy?" A $350 embosser would be an amazing thing. Hundreds of well-intentioned editors and readers are willing to take the inventor's word for it. But this device is not a embosser.
As we've proven time and again right here in this community, people with disabilities have informed experience and lots of design ideas. The net has made interacting with endusers and experts and expert endusers really easy. When I saw the BRAIGO announcement, it took me around 15 minutes to realize that it wasn't a embosser. We live in a press release culture: what the company wants to say is what we hear. Or in this case, what a 12 year old (who mentions absolutely no contact with braille users) says gets broadcast.
Terminology
Printers put ink onto paper; embossers push dots into paper.
Braillers and braillewriters are like a manual typewriter: six keys and a space bar depressed in various combinations.
The slate & stylus is the equivalent of a pen and notebook; almost weightless, cheap, and quiet.
Here's the real-world market of embossers, in a chart from AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's newsletter/website about all sorts of technology for Blind and low-vision people.
http://www.afb.org/ProdBrowseCatResults.asp?CatID=45
The price of a embosser is directly related to the volume of Braille it produces. Small-volume embossers cost between $1,800 and $5,000 and large-volume ones may cost between $10,000 and $80,000.
Start from the first dot at the RNIB's Learning Braille site or pick an excellent start for adults at the Achayra firm in India. Teach more at the National Federation of the Blind's Braille is Beautiful resource for kids.
tl;dr Just because assistive technologies are tools for people with disabilities doesn't mean we must accept only good intentions. We want the best engineers working on our designs, the best marketers making them affordable, and the best politicians making them subsidized.
selkiechick posted with the best intention.However, that announcement pushed a whole row of my Assistive Technology Geek buttons, and I gotta rant. I'll can use the "BRAIGO" to illustrate why I get so hot under the collar. (My cred: I've hung out with people who use assistive technology since 1982; I designed and sold braille translation software and embossers in the late eighties; and I've personally depended on assistive technology since 1991.) Based on thirty year's close attention to the development/PR/funding/purchasing/abandonment cycle for assistive technology, here's my take on the BRAIGO announcement.
We're familiar with that trope, "the poor disabled person needs an AB person to show that life is worth living"? This attitude underlies a long-standing, and disturbing, pattern when it comes to the design, engineering, and most especially PR about assistive technology. Inventive able-bodied people too often think the issue with assistive technology is that nobody's thought deeply about how to fix our problems. After all, we're disabled, we couldn't possibly have the answers to our own needs. Since the issue is "deep insight," you'd think the next step would be contacting and consulting with end users, but this is almost never the case. Similar attitudes support the assumption that designing for people with disabilities is a charitable move. These tasks are often put to beginning designers, folks who are least aware that the simplest tool is embedded in complex culture.
The BRAIGO design shows profound ignorance of how people create and read braille, and the designer never mentions any interaction with blind people. The designer says on his Facebook site "it requires 10-15 seconds to make one braille letter" (actually, they're called "cells.") The BRAIGO embosses one cell per line on the same paper that's used for cash register receipts, which isn't strong enough to hold a braille dot for very long. Since braille format information is conveyed through printing characters (like asterisks and underlines in email), a single cell line can't have any format information. That's why the BRAIGO can't create useful braille.
When I contacted the designer, he wrote BRAIGO is "a proof of concept and with the design and code to be made public, the idea is anybody can use it and enhance." In other words, more people can spend time playing with a device that produces almost unreadable, unstoreable, unformatted braille. No research or knowledge about actual braille production seems to be part of the package. The designer's best output right now is public relations. The device is a one-off prototype, and the designer never plans a shipping product. Every accolade this young man receives also spreads misinformation.
The headline "embossers, once $2000, now $350" is popping up like fireflies on 1000s of sites. Now imagine when a braille user goes to the boss for a embosser. "How much are we looking at?" the boss asks. The employee replies, "For a decent one, $5000." The boss says, "But I read about one that costs $350 on Upworthy?" A $350 embosser would be an amazing thing. Hundreds of well-intentioned editors and readers are willing to take the inventor's word for it. But this device is not a embosser.
As we've proven time and again right here in this community, people with disabilities have informed experience and lots of design ideas. The net has made interacting with endusers and experts and expert endusers really easy. When I saw the BRAIGO announcement, it took me around 15 minutes to realize that it wasn't a embosser. We live in a press release culture: what the company wants to say is what we hear. Or in this case, what a 12 year old (who mentions absolutely no contact with braille users) says gets broadcast.
Terminology
Printers put ink onto paper; embossers push dots into paper.
Braillers and braillewriters are like a manual typewriter: six keys and a space bar depressed in various combinations.
The slate & stylus is the equivalent of a pen and notebook; almost weightless, cheap, and quiet.
Here's the real-world market of embossers, in a chart from AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's newsletter/website about all sorts of technology for Blind and low-vision people.
http://www.afb.org/ProdBrowseCatResults.asp?CatID=45
The price of a embosser is directly related to the volume of Braille it produces. Small-volume embossers cost between $1,800 and $5,000 and large-volume ones may cost between $10,000 and $80,000.
- The least expensive embossers output 15 to 25 cells/second, (220 times faster than BRAIGO)
- The standard braille book page is 40 cells wide by 25 lines down (39 times wider and 24 times deeper)
- Braille is very bulky because the pages are thicker with all those bumps. One rule of thumb is 100 pages of print running text yields three braille volumes, 100 pages each. Imagine how many cash-register tapes it would take just to print a con schedule summary?
Start from the first dot at the RNIB's Learning Braille site or pick an excellent start for adults at the Achayra firm in India. Teach more at the National Federation of the Blind's Braille is Beautiful resource for kids.
tl;dr Just because assistive technologies are tools for people with disabilities doesn't mean we must accept only good intentions. We want the best engineers working on our designs, the best marketers making them affordable, and the best politicians making them subsidized.