 The Braille system is a method that is widely used by blind people to read and write. Braille was devised in 1821 by Louis Braille, a Frenchman. Each Braille character or ''cell'' is made up of six dot positions, arranged in a rectangle containing two columns of three dots each. A dot may be raised at any of the six positions to form sixty-four (2 6) permutations, including the arrangement in which no dots are raised. For reference purposes, a particular permutation may be described by naming the positions where dots are raised, the positions being universally numbered 1 to 3, from top to bottom, on the left, and 4 to 6, from top to bottom, on the right. For example, dots 1-3-4 would describe a cell with three dots raised, at the top and bottom in the left column and on top of the right column, i.e., the letter ''m''. The lines of horizontal Braille text are separated by a space, much like visible printed text, so that the dots of one line can be differentiated from the Braille text above and below. Punctuation is represented by its own unique set of characters. The Braille system was based on a method of communication originally developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a code that soldiers could use to communicate silently and without light at night called night writing. Barbier's system was too complex for soldiers to learn, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 he visited the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, France, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified the major failing of the code, which was that the human finger could not encompass the whole symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. His modification was to use a 6 dot cell — the Braille system — which revolutionized written communication for the blind. The Braille alphabet Braille can be seen as the world's first binary encoding scheme for representing the characters of a writing system. The system as originally invented by Braille consists of two parts: Today different Braille codes (or code pages) are used to map character sets of different languages to the six bit cells. Different Braille codes are also used for different uses like mathematics and music. However, because the six-dot Braille cell only offers 64 possible combinations (26 = 64), of which some are omitted because they feel the same (having the same dots pattern in a different position), many Braille characters have different meanings based on their context. Therefore, character mapping is not one-to-one. In addition to simple encoding, modern Braille transcription uses contractions to increase reading speed. (See: Grade 2 Braille) The Braille cell Braille generally consists of cells of six raised dots arranged in a grid of two dots horizontally by three dots vertically. The dots are conventionally numbered 1, 2, and 3 from the top of the left column and 4, 5, and 6 from the top of the right column. The presence or absence of dots gives the coding for the symbol. Dot height is approximately 0.02 inches (0.5 mm); the horizontal and vertical spacing between dot centers within a Braille cell is approximately 0.1 inches (2.5 mm); the blank space between dots on adjacent cells is approximately 0.15 inches (3.75 mm) horizontally and 0.2 inches (5.0 mm) vertically.date=April 2008 A standard Braille page is 11 inches by 11.5 inches and typically has a maximum of 40 to 43 Braille cells per line and 25 lines. Encoding As originally conceived by Louis Braille, a sequence of characters, using the top four dots of the Braille cell, represents letters a through j. Dot 3 is added to each of the a through j symbols to give letters k through t. Both of the bottom dots (dots 3 and 6) are added to the symbols for ''a'' through e to give letters u, v, x, y, and z. The letter w is an exception to the pattern because French did not make use of the letter ''w'' at the time Louis Braille devised his alphabet, and thus he had no need to encode the letter ''w''. English Braille codes the letters and punctuation, and some double letter signs and word signs directly, but capitalization and numbers are dealt with by using a prefix symbol. In practice, Braille produced in the United Kingdom does not have capital letters. There are Braille codes for representing shorthand (produced on a machine which embosses a paper tape) and for representing mathematics (Nemeth Braille code) and musical notation (Braille music). Writing Braille Braille may be produced using a ''slate and stylus'' in which each dot is created from the back of the page, writing in mirror image, by hand, or it may be produced on a Braille typewriter or ''Perkins Brailler'', or produced by a Braille embosser attached to a computer. It may also be rendered using a refreshable Braille display. Braille has been extended to an 8-dot code, particularly for use with Braille embossers and refreshable Braille displays. In 8-dot Braille the additional dots are added at the bottom of the cell, giving a matrix 4 dots high by 2 dots wide. The additional dots are given the numbers 7 (for the lower-left dot) and 8 (for the lower-right dot). Eight-dot Braille has the advantages that the case of an individual letter is directly coded in the cell containing the letter and that all the printable ASCII characters can be represented in a single cell. All 256 (2 8) possible combination of 8 dots are encoded by the Unicode standard. Braille with six dots is frequently stored as Braille ASCII. The first ten letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1 through 0 are formed using only the top four dots (1, 2, 4, and 5). Adding dot 3 forms the next ten letters, and adding dot 6 forms the last five letters (except w) and the words ''and'', ''for'', ''of'', ''the'', and ''with''. Omitting dot 3 forms the letters U-Z and the five word symbols form nine digraphs (ch, gh, sh, th, wh, ed, er, ou, and ow) and the letter w. Letters and numbers Image:Braille A1.svg| A, 1 Image:Braille B2.svg| B, 2 Image:Braille C3.svg| C, 3 Image:Braille D4.svg| D, 4 Image:Braille E5.svg| E, 5 Image:Braille F6.svg| F, 6 Image:Braille G7.svg| G, 7 Image:Braille H8.svg| H, 8 Image:Braille I9.svg| I, 9 Image:Braille J0.svg| J, 0 Other symbols Image:Braille CapitalSign.svg|Capital letter follows Image:Braille NumberSign.svg| Number follows Image:Braille Period.svg|Full stop (Period) Image:Braille Comma.svg| CommaImage:Braille ExclamationPoint.svg|Exclamation point Image:Braille QuoteOpen.svg|Opening quotation mark, question mark * Image:Braille QuoteClose.svg|Closing quotation mark Image:Braille Hyphen.svg| HyphenNote: Grade 2 Braille contractions Image:Braille AND.svg|The word AND Image:Braille_Â.svg|The letters CH Image:Braille SH.svg|The letters SH Image:Braille ST.svg|The letters ST Image:Braille_Ô.svg|The letters TH This is just a small sample of some of the contractions that are used in Grade 2 Braille. More information about Grade 2 Braille is below in the section on Braille transcription. Braille also includes a number of whole word contractions, for example the word Braille becomes a three cell word brl. Unicode rendering table The Unicode standard encodes 8-dot Braille glyphs according to their binary appearance, rather than following the alphabetic order of any particular convention. Unicode defines the ''Braille Patterns'' character block in the hex codepoint range from 2800 to 28FF. Braille transcription Although it is possible to transcribe Braille by simply substituting the equivalent Braille character for its printed equivalent, such a character-by-character transcription (known as ''Grade 1 Braille'') is used only by beginners. Braille characters are much larger than their printed equivalents, and the standard 11'' by 11.5'' (28 cm × 30 cm) page has room for only 25 lines of 43 characters. To reduce space and increase reading speed, virtually all Braille books are transcribed in what is known as ''Grade 2 Braille,'' which uses a system of contractions to reduce space and speed the process of reading. As with most human linguistic activities, Grade 2 Braille embodies a complex system of customs, styles, and practices. The Library of Congress's '' '' runs to nearly 200 pages. Braille transcription is skilled work, and Braille transcribers need to pass certification tests. In English, the system of Grade 2 Braille contractions begins with a set of 23 words which are contracted to single characters. Thus the word ''but'' is contracted to the single letter ''b,'' ''can'' to ''c'', ''do'' to ''d'', and so on. Even this simple rule creates issues requiring special cases; for example, ''d'' is, specifically, an abbreviation of the verb ''do;'' the noun ''do'' representing the note of the musical scale is a different word, and must be spelled out. Portions of words may be contracted, and many rules govern this process. For example, the character with dots 2-3-5 (the letter ''f'' lowered in the Braille cell) stands for ''ff'' when used in the middle of a word. At the beginning of a word, this same character stands for the word ''to'' although the character is written in Braille with no space following it. At the end of a word, the same character represents an exclamation point. One problem that can occur when reading Grade 2 Braille is that some contractions are closely similar, even when the words are not. One example compares the contractions ''ll'', meaning little, and ''lr'', meaning letter from Barry Hampshire's ''Working with Braille''. The braille notation for the letter ''r'' differs only by adding one dot to the letter ''l''. This causes greater confusion between words that are not as similar in normal print and can hinder the learning process of Grade 2 Braille. The contraction rules take into account the linguistic structure of the word; thus, contractions are not to be used when their use would alter the usual Braille form of a base word to which a prefix or suffix has been added. And some portions of the transcription rules are not fully codified and rely on the judgment of the transcriber. Thus, when the contraction rules permit the same word in more than one way, preference is given to ''the contraction that more nearly approximates correct pronunciation.'' The current series of Canadian banknotes have raised dots on the banknotes that indicate the denomination and can be easily identified by visually impaired people; this 'tactile feature' does not use standard Braille but, instead, a system developed in consultation with blind and visually impaired Canadians after research indicated that not all potential users read Braille. Mexican bank notes also have special raised symbols to make them identifiable by the visually impaired. Though Braille is thought to be the main way blind people read and write, in Britain (for example) out of the reported two-million visually impaired population, it is estimated that only around 15-20 thousand people use Braille. Younger people are turning to electronic text on computers with screen reader software instead, a more portable communication method that they can also use with their friends. A debate has started on how to make Braille more attractive and for more teachers to be available to teach it. In India there are instances where the parliament acts have been published in Braille too. For example Braille reading techniques Since Braille is one of the few writing systems where tactile perception is used, as opposed to visual perception, a Braille reader must develop new skills. One skill important for Braille readers is the ability to create smooth and even pressures when running one's fingers along the words. There are many different styles and techniques used for the understanding and development of Braille, even though a study by B. F. Holland suggests that there is no specific technique that is superior to any other. Another study by Lowenfield & Abel shows that Braille could be read ''the fastest and best... by students who read using the index fingers of both hands.'' Another important reading skill emphasized in this study is to finish reading the end of a line with the right hand and to find the beginning of the next line with the left hand simultaneously. One final conclusion drawn by both Lowenfield and Abel is that children have difficulty using both hands independently where the right hand is the dominant hand. But this hand preference does not correlate to other activities. Braille for other scripts There are many extensions of Braille for additional letters with diacritics, such as ''ç, ô, é''. When Braille is adapted to languages which do not use the Latin alphabet, the blocks are generally assigned to the new alphabet according to how it is transliterated into the Latin alphabet, and the alphabetic order of the national script (and therefore the natural order of Latin Braille) is disregarded. Such is the case with Russian, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese. In Greek, for example, ''gamma'' is written as Latin ''g'', despite the fact that it has the alphabetic position of ''c''; Hebrew ''bet'', the second letter of the alphabet and cognate with the Latin letter ''b'', is sometimes pronounced /b/ and sometimes /v/, and is written ''b'' or ''v'' accordingly; Russian ''ts'' is written as ''c'', which is the usual letter for /ts/ in those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet; and Arabic ''f'' is written as ''f'', despite being historically ''p'', and occurring in that part of the Arabic alphabet (between historic ''o'' and ''q''). Esperanto letters with circumflexes, ''ĉ'', ''ĝ'', ''ĥ'', ''ĵ'' and ''ŝ'', are written as those letters without circumflexes with a filled sixth dot. Therefore the letter ''ĵ'' has the same representation as the English ''w'' and to write a ''w'' in Esperanto, the dot 3 is filled (dots 2-3-4-5-6 are used for ''w'' instead of dots 2-4-5-6) The ''ŭ'', used in Esperanto also, is as the u but the first dot is moved to the fourth place. Greater differences occur in Chinese Braille. In the case of Mandarin Braille, which is based on Zhuyin rather than the Latin Pinyin alphabet, the traditional Latin Braille values are used for initial consonants and the simple vowels. However, on Latin Braille for many of the initial consonants and simple vowels (based on romanizations of a century ago), but the blocks pull double duty, with different values depending on whether they're placed in syllable-initial or syllable-final position. For instance, the block for Latin ''k'' represents old-style Cantonese ''k'' (''g'' in Yale and other modern romanizations) when initial, but ''aak'' when final, while Latin ''j'' represents Cantonese initial ''j'' but final ''oei''. However, at least three adaptations of Braille have completely reassigned the Latin sound values of the blocks. These are, Japanese Braille, Korean Braille, and Tibetan Braille. In Japanese Braille, alphabetic signs for a consonant and vowel are combined into a single syllabic block; in Korean Braille, the consonants have different syllable-initial and syllable-final forms. These modifications made Braille much more compatible with Japanese kana and Korean hangul, but meant that the Latin sound values could not be maintained. | 
College Algebra Essentials has 624 pages in its text version but in the Braille version it has 4,153 pages! And we made then all!!!
braille time!
Too bad the closest - oh, wait, I mean *only* - place in Canada to get braille done up professionally is in Toronto. :(
