Lots of Dots and More Quiz | Languages

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1. He established a school for blind children, L'Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, in 1784. Here an education almost equivalent to that of sighted children was offered: history, languages, geography, music, sciences, and reading. He used a system of embossed letters that the blind students could read with their fingers. He did not develop a way to write these letters; that is to say, his system could be printed using a printing press but a person could not sit down and write his/her friend a note using the raised letters which was a distinct drawback of this system!

Answer: Valentin Hauy

In 1771, Valentin Hauy witnessed a concert in a Paris coffee house at which blind musicians dressed in buffoons' caps and cardboard spectacles played on broken instruments--to the amusement and delight of the patrons. Hauy was disgusted. A student of Jean Jacques Rousseau and a believer in education, social reform, and the dignity of man, Hauy's response to the concert was to found a school for blind children, L'Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, in 1784. Hauy produced a book with embossed letters, which the blind could read by touch, ESSAI SUR L'EDUCATION DES AVEUGLES. Hauy's book was the first of its kind in the world: a mass-produced text designed specifically for the blind. Embossing, while almost unknown as a deliberate effect, was familiar to all book readers as the common accidental result of heavy letterpress printing. And it was well known that some particularly gifted blind people could learn tactile language. Hauy himself knew and admired Teresa Paradis, a blind Viennese musician who had devised a system of pin-cushion writing for her musical notation. Almost certainly he was aware of Didymus of fourth-century Alexandria, who traced letters inscribed on wax. ... But these people were considered exceptions. Hauy stood alone in his conviction that ordinary blind people could read, and he placed his money where his metaphorical mouth was.

Louis XVI was the king of France who was executed during the French Revolution. Voltaire was an Enlightenment writer. The Abb� de l'�p�e opened a school for the deaf in Paris in the mid 18th century--something must have been in the air of 18th-century Paris for both the blind and the deaf were thave schools!

2. In 1821, Charles Barbier, an army officer concerned with night-time military communication, brought his system of sonographie to L'Institut. This system used a cell consisting of as many as twelve dots in two vertical rows of six. It was phonetic not alphabetic. By so doing he sparked the imagination of one of the schools pupils. Who was this teenaged genius?

Answer: Louis Braille

Braille was not born blind but rather lost his vision due to an accident as a young child. He punctured one eye with an awl used by his father, a leather worker and lost the vision in that eye and in the other as well due to sympathetic ophthalmia. I suspect he'd make an interesting subject for the type of fictionalized biography done so well by Erving Stone

Michael Mellor was the English-born editor of the Matilda Ziegler for the Blind and has an interesting bio of Louis Braille recently out.

Christopher Gray is the current head of a major blind consumer organization, ACB. (For information on both major consumer organizations: see www.nfb.org or www.acb.org)

Anne Sullivan Macey was the teacher/interpreter for Helen Keller.

3. The director of the Perkins Institute and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in Boston was Samuel Gridley Howe, an adventurer who was ready to settle down after spending some years as fighter and fundraiser for the Greek wars. Howe had traveled around Europe in 1831 visiting various schools for the blind. The printing system he designed for Perkins based on one used in Scotland used compressed, angular, Roman letters. This system was to be the most widely known and used system in the United States for the next fifty years. What was it called?

Answer: Boston Line Type

Perkins Standard and Adapted Braille are made up by the author.

A major difference in the production of Philadelphia Line was how it was printed. Unlike Boston Line which was printed using raised or embossed letter type, Philadelphia Line used the intaglio method and forced paper into holes punched into copper plates that had been treated to make them very smooth.

The title page of the 'Our Special Magazine' produced by National Braille Press, www.nbp.org, is still produced in Boston Line. I cannot read it and am amazed at anyone who ever could!

Howe's wife, Julia, would later write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

4. According to the website of the RNIB: "This system of embossed reading was invented by Dr William Moon in 1845. Many people know about the braille system of reading by touch; fewer have heard of this system. This is a simple method based upon the standard alphabet. The alphabet is made up of 14 characters used at various angles, each with a clear bold outline. For many elderly blind people especially, this system is easier than the more complex braille system, although many people gain confidence from learning it to move on to braille."

Answer: Moon Type

To learn more visit http://www.rnib.org.uk/braille/moonc.htm

I have felt this type once when a friend, having obtained some materials from RNIB, showed them to me. It felt like little raised shapes such as would be used for decorative purposes on leather. I should consider researching it again.

5. "This system was said to have been developed in 1868 by William Bell Wait, superintendent of the New York Institution for the Blind which was later renamed the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind. Wait's conversion to the dot system resulted from a survey of 664 pupils of seven institutions all of whom used Boston Line Type. His study revealed that out of this number 1/3 were good readers, 1/3 could read by spelling out words letter for letter, and 1/3 could not read at all." Irwin--The War of the Dots--p4. Name it?

Answer: New York Point

Grade II Braille is the present-day standard. Grade III Braille is a very highly contracted form of Braille used mostly for notetaking. Duxbury, a Braille translation software, doesn't have the capability to translate into Grade III. NFBTrans, a freeware translation software, can translate using some of the contractions of Grade III Braille. The other choices do not exist.

New York Point differed from Braille in two major ways. Whereas Louis Braille had developed his code in what had appeared to him to be a logical sequence starting with a single dot for "a" and gradually increasing the number of dots as the end of the alphabet neared, Wait thought it more scientific to take into account the frequency of occurrence of the various letters. For example, t appears more frequently in English than k does. Braille assigns t four dots and k, two. Wait changed all this by assigning the fewest dots to the most frequently occurring letters. For example, "e" and "t" each had one dot, "a,"
"n," "o," and "s" had two dots, while "q" had four dots and "x"
and "z" had five. This would not have meant anything without the second change. Whereas, Braille used a fixed cell consisting of two vertical rows three dots high, Wait had a cell two dots high but with a varying base of as many as four dots. For further information, see Mellor, Michael Making a Point: The Crusade for a Universal Embossed Code in the United States

6. Aware of New York Point's drawbacks, a blind instructor at the Perkins Institution began to modify Braille's system. What he did in the main was recast Braille's 3 by 2 dot matrix and represent the most frequently occurring letters with the least number of dots. Who was he?

Answer: Joel W. Smith

Smith taught piano tuning at Perkins. (He is credited with inventing the touch typing technique still employed by those blind users of computer keyboards.)

According to Mellor in Making a Point ... But he was a mild-mannered man and when he presented his modified Braille system at the 1878 American Association of Instructors of the Blind or AAIB meeting he was harshly treated by the aggressive, antagonistic (and sighted) Wait and his supporters. Thus was American Braille or modified Braille shot down.

Kenneth Jernigan (1926-1998) was one of only four men to be elected president of the National Federation of the Blind since its founding in 1940.

Rose Resnick's story is told in her autobiography, 'Dare to Dream'.

Newell Perry was a blind educator who received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Munich in 1902.

7. This deaf-blind individual constructed a machine (no longer in existence), the Diplograph, that could, at the flip of a lever, produce Line Type, Braille, or New York Point. Name this individual.

Answer: James Morrison Heady

Thompson writes in Heady's biography, Beyond the Double Night: Heady's lucid, incisive, thorough exposition inspired one APH Board member, Mr Chapin, to comment, "It struck me that it would be a very good subject for consideration ... to get expressions of opinion from all the institutions of the country. That is, for these institutions to select their best readers, and let them indicate what letters in
their opinion are the most difficult, or on which they make the
most mistakes." In other words, he was saying that blind people, and they alone, should decide the direction in which embossed type should evolve. "No one was listening."

"The Miracle Worker" acquainted the public with Helen Keller's story.

Laura Bridgeman was the first deaf-blind person to be educated and methods used to educate her at Perkins in the 1830s were also later used with Helen Keller.

Robert Smithdas wrote Life at My Fingertips. He discussed his pursuit of a Masters Degree, one of a very few deaf-blind people to have done this.

8. This was a machine to write New York Point. And its design and merit were recognized by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, which conferred its John Scott Medal upon Wait. Supporters of Point used this award to buttress their case. What was it called?

Answer: Kleidograph

The optacon, or optical tactile converter, turns print letter shapes into a series of raised vibrating pins. It was very popular in the mid to late 1970s but is not used as much now because of the advances in scanning and OCR technology.

The Hall was the Brailler used before the current or Perkins Brailler came on the scene about 60 or so years ago.

Taken from the March 2007 "Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind." The telegraphone is a remarkable invention that is just being put on the market. By it the human voice or other sound is recorded on a very small wire, and as it unwinds the sound is given out to the listener. Attached to a telephone, it will record any messages received, and at any time by placing the receiver to the ear one can have all the messages repeated that came to his telephone during his absence and that were automatically recorded. By another
attachment, the sound can be recorded on a steel disk and reproduced similar to the phonograph, but more distinct, and the disks are much cheaper made.
The publisher of this magazine saw the device working and was interested in it from the standpoint of what it may mean to the blind. Its promoters claim that these disks in time will be made and sent out to the blind with the news of the day, and school lessons or other matter on them. The world certainly does move!

9. On June 25, 1913 it was recommended at the convention of the American Association of Workers for the Blind held at Jacksonville, Illinois that an entirely new system be promulgated for use throughout the entire country, scrapping both New York Point and American Braille.--Irwin-p51-58. What was it called?

Answer: Standard Dot

Irwin explains (pages 51-58) that in 1915 both the AAIB and AAWB held joint conventions. Before the two associations the Uniform Type Committee reported the completion of its work on the development of this code (based on research gained while committee representatives were in Great Britain in 1914) and recommended its adoption for general use.

The AAWB or American Association of Workers for the Blind accepted the report and adopted the new system. However, the AAIB composed of mostly seeing executives voted to accept the Standard Dot system on condition that the British type authorities would do likewise.

The Uniform Type Committee was disbanded and the new Commission on Uniform Type for the Blind was created to carry on the work. The British studied the code that its developers hoped would be the worldwide type for the English-speaking blind; and while official correspondence was polite, they ppopularly dubbed it "Standard Rot" and would have none of it! However, there was little support for this system in the United States, and without British participation the code would not go into practical use.

10. "By 1932, the AAIB and AAWB formed a committee with plenary powers to agree upon a uniform code. On July 19, 1932 the agreement also known as the Treaty of London was signed. A key to the modified code was drawn up before the committee adjourned." Irwin--p73-75.

Answer: True

"These changes were made to the existing British code: Religious signs were dropped from general usage but could be used in religious books. Publishers were directed to be more careful about not bridging syllable divisions with contractions. Roman numerals were to be followed by a period, not an apostrophe. Capitalization was made optional with the publisher.

The two-dot capital sign and the one-dot italics sign were interchanged. (Neither, especially the capital, are used much in British Braille). Grade 2 was now ready for use in the United States.

The Library of Congress which funds Braille production in the United States adopted the new code immediately and in 1933, the AAWB did as did the AAIB the following year. The American Printing House also adopted the code but only for its junior and senior high textbooks. Fearing that highly contracted Braille makes for bad spellers, it was very reluctant to adopt this system in its textbooks for primary grades but did by 1950 with the exception of first grade." Irwin--p73-75

Source: Author biblioholik

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Lots of Dots and More Trivia Quiz

It may not be commonly known that Braille was not the only system used by the blind. In the 19th century, one had to know several systems in order to read much less write anything down! Come with me as we take a journey back through time to study dots.

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