[VogonPoetry]

I did a maths undergrad degree and the way my blind, mostly deaf friend and I communicated was using a stylized version of TeX markup. I typed on a terminal and he read / wrote on his braille terminal. It worked really well.

[kkylin]

Thanks! Did you communicate in "raw" TeX, or was it compiled / encoded for braille? Can you point me at the software you used?

[VogonPoetry]

Yes, mostly raw TeX, just plain ascii - not specially coded for Braille. This was quite a long time ago, mid 1980's, so not long after TeX had started to spread in computer science and maths communities. My friend was using a "Versa Braille" terminal hooked via a serial port to a BBC Micro running a terminal program that I'd written. I cannot completely remember how we came to an understanding of the syntax to use. We did shorten some items because the Versa Braille only had 20 chars per "line".

He is still active and online and has a contact page see https://www.foneware.net. I have been a poor correspondent with him - he will not know my HN username. I will try to reach out to him.

[VogonPoetry]

Now that I've been recalling more memories of this, I do remember there being encoding or "escaped" character issues - particularly with brackets and parentheses.

There was another device between the BBC Micro and the "Versa Braille" unit. The interposing unit was a matrix switch that could multiplex between different serial devices - I now suspect it might also have been doing some character escaping / translation.

For those not familiar with Braille, it uses a 2x3 array (6 bits) to encode everything. The "standard" (ahem, by country) Braille encodings are super-sub-optimal for pretty much any programming language or mathematics.

After a bit of (me)memory refresh, in "standard" Braille you only get ( and ) - and they both encode to the same 2x3 pattern! So in Braille ()() and (()) would "read" as the same thing.

I now understand why you were asking about the software used. I do not recall how we completely worked this out. We had to have added some sort of convention for scoping.

I now also remember that the Braille terminal aggressively compressed whitespace. My friend liked to use (physical) touch to build a picture, but it was not easy to send spatial / line-by-line information to the Braille terminal.

Being able to rely on spatial information has always stuck with me. It is for this reason I've always had a bias against Python, it is one of the few languages that depends on precise whitespace for statement syntax / scope.

[kkylin]

Thank you so much for all this detail. This is very interesting & quite helpful, and it's great you were able to communicate all this with your friend.

For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).

My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)

FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.

Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.