A Talk on the Future of Braille in the digital Age

This is the transcript of the German-language podcast. I smoothed the text a little, but kept the verbal character. The idiosyncratic punctuation is due to automatic transcription and my habit of putting punctuation marks where I think they're great. I smoothed the language out a bit, but retained the oral character. All spelling errors and inaccuracies in content are my responsibility.

I talk to Aleksander about the role Braille plays today. There is one piece of information I forgot to mention in the conversation: Aleksander is also involved in the ongoing development of Braille, at least in Germany. There is a separate committee for this in which he participates.

Introduction

Domingos: Welcome to a new podcast on digital accessibility. Today I have another exciting guest with me, namely Aleksander Pavkovic. Aleksander first of all, thank you very much for taking the time for this podcast.

Aleksander: yes, thank you very much for the invitation.

Aleksander's career

Domingos: I would like to talk to Aleksander about the topic of Braille in digital accessibility. We usually talk a lot about speech output, but there are also a significant proportion of blind people who use Parallel Braille or only use it if, for example, they are deaf-blind or have special tasks. And unfortunately there are a few differences between Braille and speech output that we have to explain to ourselves. But before we do that, I would ask you, Aleksander, to introduce yourself to those listening.

Aleksander: Yes very much. I'm 46 years old, I belong to the very small group of people who were born blind within the blind community, so we're a minority there too, because as with most disabilities, or actually all. If the proportion of those who somehow acquired this later in life through an illness, an accident or something similar is significantly higher than at birth, the same is true for blindness. So I'm one of those people who hasn't seen anything since birth. And yes, based on my training and my studies, I am actually a linguist, a Slavic scholar, I have dealt with Slavic languages, I have my Slavic, namely Slovenian, origins, so to speak. Yes, I used it to deal with it scientifically and now I'm in quite high demand again as a Slavic scholar, which on the one hand makes me happy, but on the other hand it has a very tragic reason. This is simply the Ukraine context. Now I'm really back in a situation where I can use my language skills. Blind and visually impaired refugees from Ukraine, for example, here in Bavaria. Word got around pretty quickly after the war started, so you can talk to him in Ukrainian in a relaxed manner, and then of course they came to me. The advice I often have to do with interpreting, translating and so on.

As it is often the case for disabled people with an academic degree, I somehow ended up in self-help. I have been working in the entire area of digital accessibility since July 2013 at the Bavarian Association of the Blind and Visually Impaired in Munich. In the state office there is something like this. Yes, the club's internal company, the department for accessible media, is called the BIT center. That's where I work, before that I worked as an IT trainer for 3 years in a vocational school center for blind young adults in Nuremberg. That was my career start. So actually I had completely different things in mind. Journalism, staying at university, something nice like that, but that's how it came about. Yes, from a user's perspective and from my deepening of the subject matter, including the keyword SelfHTML and everything else I've done, I got into the area of digital accessibility, but I'm not just blind at birth and blind to my profession, I'm doing other things too. For example, since September 2020, I have been a part-time deacon in the Catholic Church.

Domingos: Yes, very exciting. We are almost the same age and probably studied almost at the same time, but you are one of the few blind people who have a doctorate (the German version of a Ph.D). Maybe you can say something about the challenge of doing a doctorate as a blind person.

Aleksander: The challenge of doing a doctorate as a blind person obviously depends very much on the subject. For me it was a linguistics doctoral thesis, not just linguistics, but even a linguistic history, a linguistic history doctoral thesis.

This was based on the master’s thesis. My master's thesis supervisor said, Wow, this topic is exciting, what you have worked on, Czech and Slovenian in comparison, so Slovenian is my native language. And Czech, yes, I studied in Prague for half a year, where I collected a lot of material and so on and discovered a lot of similarities, some planned similarities. The linguists in the 19th century in Slovenia oriented themselves towards Czech as a model language because it was already better developed and things like that. But it was also hardly researched and then the supervisor said that wouldn't be a doctoral topic. And of course that meant going down into the archives, reading things from the 18th century and the 19th century. Printed things, but also a lot of things that are handwritten. And that meant for me as soon as I went into the archives. Having to work with assistance because electronic text capture fails; OCR, optical character recognition, works to a limited extent these days with fairly legible handwriting.

But it was 20 years ago, 15 to 20 years ago, when I didn't have a chance to work with something like that. And especially not with such old materials, that means I had to rely on assistance with handwriting. Everything that was printed, including in the Fraktur fonts, in the 19th century and so on. This could then also be done with special OCR versions.

But going to archives, going to libraries and so on, I mostly worked according to the give and take principle, for example with young students who then read things to me, i.e. those who were well versed in older writings and so on those who can read. And I also helped them, for example typing up their homework. I pretty quickly became known as a pretty fast typist and stuff like that. Or typography, layout, that was quite interesting that a blind person also gave them tips. There was an anecdote, for example An acquaintance of mine had me proofread her doctoral thesis on literary studies. And then I started my final report with: Dear Andrea, thank you very much. Before I get to the content aspects of your work, allow me to make a few comments about typography and layout. And then there were two pages, a list with lots of entries, what I would do differently, like not using too much bold and italics. Oh, then she was surprised, Andrea. Yes, that is possible if you have your screen reader under control.

The challenge with the doctorate was, above all, getting access to materials that are not now available electronically, when something is available electronically or I have made it accessible somehow. typing it up, taking notes, having it typed out or something like that, everything else was easy to do. I strictly forbade my doctoral supervisor, i.e. the supervisor of the thesis, from mentioning my blindness anywhere in the report or anywhere else. I made a small comment somewhere in the foreword that I would like to thank this and that person. So for support in transferring to electronic versions, because I can then deal with it better with my Braille display and screen reader. So if you read carefully you will find the information. But I deliberately didn't want to spread them widely in any way. The scientific community, which rightly treats such materials very critically and reads a new doctoral thesis very critically, well, what is the young scientist doing there, they shouldn't read it through the lens of pity, oh yes, the blind man has it managed too, wow respect and all. I wanted to avoid all of this.

Domingos: Digitalization wasn't really that advanced back in the two thousand years. We're not really that advanced in Germany today, but back then almost everything was actually analogue, so even the standard textbooks or magazines were basically still on paper.

Aleksander: Yes, that was the case back then and it is still the case today that blind students turn to me with the question: How do I do this and that and if something is already available digitally, then in some unspeakably inaccessible PDFs or similar formats.

Technology problems of many blind people

Domingos: Yes, thank you very much for this insight. In general, another question. You have already mentioned that you have a lot of contact with people through the blind association in Bavaria, some of whom probably went blind late in life and some of whom also had little contact with technology. And I would be interested to know which problems they mainly report about or which problems you mainly experience.

Aleksander: The main problems of older people with late disabilities in particular, but not only, are really when digitalization comes about these days, when the technology is now basically accessible and accessible or at least quite easy to use, i.e. smartphones You can easily pick up the iPhone and many Android smartphones, put them into operation, and use them independently.

But for many people this is not as low-threshold as you might imagine as a younger, technology-savvy, blind person, because. This use of the touchscreen requires, firstly, a lot of motor skills and, secondly, cognitively, a lot of thinking or something like that, like where how do I find the objects clearly? Swipe from left to right and back. I somehow always go forwards and backwards But that quickly becomes inefficient and so on, so it overwhelms many people and they tend to somehow prefer to get a special cell phone like the ones that are still available, either with buttons or without them, with a reduced user interface, which then doesn't work Such a person might be overloaded and overwhelmed. Then again you are limited in your choice of apps, so I'm quite happy that I just can use a normal mainstream smartphone and have been doing so for 12 years, always in a reasonably current form and version. But for many people there is only a very difficult path to get there. Not only for older people with late blindness, but also for people with learning difficulties, for example. I am now regularly active in a workshop, residential and educational facility and school there are young people who would like to do more with their smartphone than Hey Siri Play the following song. They just want to do a little more. But you quickly realize that you are reaching your limits because it is simply not that trivial to use such a thing. And the voice assistants, unfortunately, can't do as much as they would like.

That's really such a main point. That digital technology is still not accessible enough, even if it is already accessible, in the sense of screen readers, the possibility that you can actually access everything with a screen reader. And then there are barriers that are motor-physical or perhaps cognitive. And in the case of late blindness, of course people like to look for a solution, which is sometimes or supposedly the simpler one with special devices for pedestrian navigation, for playing content, so keyword daisy player or something like that, which includes everything Smartphones and tablets would be possible. People still like to use the classic tool, which sometimes has the advantage that you can't get distracted so easily because some short message from some app doesn't force itself into the foreground. Therefore, these aids, which also have a nice keyboard, still have their place.

And digitalization where it doesn't yet exist is a big problem. A lot of people turn to us for communication, for example with offices, with authorities and so on. A lot of things still have to be done by hand, so you have to rely on assistance.

And if it is already digital, then unfortunately there is often still a lack of accessibility. Then you have some form that you can even fill out on your PC because it is a fillable PDF, unfortunately not the rule at all. Many of them still have to be printed out and then filled out by hand. And then maybe send it back scanned. This is called semi-digitalization or something similar. But if it can be filled out on the computer or smartphone, the correct labels and so on are often missing. So digitization alone, if it's just done somehow, then it doesn't always help us.

Domingos: So my favorite example is always the topic of online banking. There are now hardly any online banks left, or probably none at all, where you can get through without an extra app to verify transactions. And that's where I'm having trouble as someone who's been doing this forever. I always wonder how older people do it who have no experience with it and aren't that fast either, because you always have a time limit.

Aleksander: So online banking is really time-critical because of the two-factor authentication that's going on, you have to be quick and there are a lot of older people in particular, but not just those, who outsource it completely. They then actually entrust these valuable services to people who they can then hopefully trust, where nothing can go wrong and where you have to discuss this carefully with your bank, because normally speaking, generally speaking, this is not allowed now, but I am I really have to do my banking online myself, I'm not allowed to hand out passwords and stuff like that. And that's why many people still rely on services from the local banks themselves. But some of them no longer exist, some have stopped doing so completely, staff savings and so on, and it's only possible online. And there are different options: On the one hand, with these apps, which you then have to additionally authorize, or with these tan generators, there are also some with voice output. And you basically have to remove a QR code from the screen. or you get the tan read out by the device and then have to type it in. So there are different options, but the problem is actually with all of them. A bit related to the problem of dialing into a video meeting, Zoom meeting for example, you have to be quick, you have to type these things relatively quickly.

Braille in the digital age

Domingos: Exactly. Then let's get to our actual topic, the topic of Braille. The first provocative question is why do we still need it these days? Electronic Braille, almost every device that we have just talked about has a voice output feature, which is super practical, you don't need an extra device, you don't have to learn any extra writing, so to speak, why do we still need Braille these days?

Aleksander: Actually, the question of why we need Braille can be answered in a single sentence, but of course it is so short that it needs to be explained. So this one very short sentence is: Being read to is not the same as reading yourself. But of course you have to do this in a slightly more differentiated way, because there are situations where being read to is completely sufficient.

So when I think about using my smartphone right now, where I might have an app read to me from time to time, what the weather is going to be or look at the news app, what's going on in the country and the world at the moment Maybe also use the daily newspaper app. I don't see the danger that if you have it read to you, you'll miss something.

the speech outputs are good. And at the same time it's like that if you only consume your information on the way. And at the same time, you always have to make yourself understood and express yourself in writing. Then there is the danger that you will write things that you have only ever heard the way you believe you are writing them because the voice outputs reads them out in a certain way. Voice outputsmake a real effort to pronounce the texts correctly. But Especially with mobile operating systems, for example, in the last few months we have been experiencing a change, let's say a change, perhaps a deterioration. A certain manufacturer seems to be constantly tinkering with these voice outputs, updating them and then it comes to very strange pronunciations. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's a bit incomprehensible, sometimes it's a complete disaster because, for example, the voice output tries to pronounce something the way it should actually be pronounced if it's a foreign word. And then there are such mistakes that the voice output, for example, actually wants to say: "zwischen Tür und Angel" but it says "zwischen Tür und Engel"l, because angel is also an English word, so it is spelled the same and where the recognition simply keeps coming failed, failed miserably. So sometimes it's not that easy to just have things read to you when the voice outputs are so available everywhere and it helps everyone if they also have the writing with them, really Braille. There are simply areas, in training, studies, work, but perhaps also in my free time, where it is difficult for me to present a text myself if I only work with voice output. There are people who are really fit and practiced - probably the most sensational example in the world is an Australian radio news anchor. At this point she works exclusively with voice output. She has a button in her ear, so to speak, where the text is read to her by a voice that is very well known in the blind community and has the eloquence that is standard in Jaws, for example. And what the lady does, she actually reads like in simultaneous interpreting, so she then reads these messages by receiving them via the voice output and then reading or speaking them. Especially in the English community, it is almost a philosophical question as to whether this type of information intake can even be described as reading. But of course, it's somehow a form of reading because I also have control. I can say: Next sentence, previous sentence, spell the word again and all that works. That's a kind of reading, perhaps a bit more indirect than reading with your eyes or fingers, because with speech output it's not just the individual letters running past you or you walking past them yourself, but rather you somehow hear the words or Parts of words. You hear them differently than when a person reads them out, less interpretatively, although as I just said, some language editions also interpret things incorrectly.

There are those who know Braille - there aren't that many blind people who do that - but they have more direct access to writing. And if I imagine that I have to do the same thing as colleagues of mine, for example in church with headphones or earphones, for example I hear a Bible passage in my ear during the mass and then repeat it so that I can remember it Reading aloud to the congregation, i.e. proclaiming it, is one of my tasks in church masses, to read the Gospel in church services. It wouldn't be my thing, you could practice. But I'm very happy that I can do it at the appropriate speed, not without having to practice a lot beforehand, but if someone tells me, I need you for a moment, read this passage later, then it works spontaneously.

Domingos: Mhm, exactly the topic of literacy or staying fit in spelling, grammar, spelling, orthography, but of course also mathematics, programming - these are very important topics where Braille can have a decisive advantage.

Aleksander: There was a study from the USA, I'm not sure who did it, which showed that people who mastered braille much more often gain a advantage in their careers, that they are much more likely to actually have a job and are much less likely to be unemployed.

Now, of course, you can raise the chicken-egg problem at this point and ask the question: Will they find a job more quickly because they can do a lot of other things anyway because of their Braille skills? So the interaction is definitely not that simple. But it probably has something to do with each other. I can do a lot of things with just voice output, but then I have to be practiced again. It's not enough to just start the voice output and everything will work somehow, but then I have to use it specifically. For example, I have set a so-called sound scheme in my screen reader in the text editing Microsoft Word, i.e. a set of settings called proofreading. And the voice changes in pitch, in timbre, in speed, so to speak. Font, font size and things like that. And also according to the font color, it's simply announced to me as the word yellow or things like that, but with italics, underlined, bold and so on, I assigned it to different voices so that descriptive commenting words like bold and underlined aren't constantly being said in between and so on, but I hear that in the sound of the text being read out, just as someone who can see immediately notices: Ah, this is somehow thicker here or it's underlined or something like that. You can do a lot with voice output and I'm still happy, especially in terms of the accuracy, even if I don't just want to briefly take note of something, but really want to memorize it in more detail. Then I'm more of a learner type, but it's probably a matter of habit that I absorb things better with Braille. Of course, that also requires a certain reading speed, such a fast reading that extracts meaning, and then it is probably a stable, flexible interaction: the more you do with it, the faster you become, a bit like in sports. Training itself simply ensures that you get better again.

A lot of information in a small area

Domingos: Yes, definitely. In general, the voice output speaks a lot of what I call meta-information. So not only is it read out what is on the screen, but for example, in the best case scenario, what the input field is labeled, whether there is already some text in it, and so on. And the problem is that Braille displays are relatively limited in terms of what they can display. 40 to 80 characters are possible, which isn't that much.

Aleksander: Yes, you really have to imagine this: Imagine that a sighted person would work in front of the computer in such a way that he would have a very small window, like a cutout, like a small template, like a ruler, something like that in terms of length, maybe longer than a ruler, but so narrow and what can be read there, what fits there, about a line or less. And when that's over he has to do something, maybe move the ruler on the screen so that the view window moves down and then you read the next line. This kind of overview in quotation marks would make anyone who can see say: Yes, that's a catastrophe, I can't work like that.

Yes, that's how we have to work. But that is the state of the art for us. There are also bigger displays that have multiple lines, but that's all meant to be able to see simple, very simplified graphics. And when it comes to text, it's not particularly practical to represent a lot of things at once, as on a page, because the reading hands of course go over the text differently than reading it with your eyes. It's not quite the same either and not quite as affordable.

So in that respect one line is fine, but still 40 characters is probably the average, most people have lines of 40 in front of them somewhere on the desks of the world. For me it's also a 40, I actually never work with 80 lines because that's too long for me. Then I have to use my fingers again, well if I read with two hands, then at 40 I can do about half of it with the other finger and something like that, but in itself it doesn't particularly increase the comfort. But it is much larger, apart from the fact that it is almost twice as expensive. And therefore preferably a 40 line.

There's a certain lower limit where it's too much scrolling and too much switching. So I have a mobile device here, a kind of Braille notebook. The braille display is, you could almost say, built into the housing. So it's clicked in, it clicks into place when you insert it like that. You can take it out and it has 14 digits. And that's really a lower limit, like 14 characters, because you actually have to keep switching. That's okay, especially when you're on the go it's handy. But that's really no long-term comfort. 40 is just a nice average.

And you always have the problem: Yes, form labels, for example, of course they never fit. So I have an abbreviation on the Braille display. For example, if I'm in a form field like this, on the web or in a PDF, I'd like to say last name, comma, first name. Then behind it there is or you can feel the cursor based on a clear representation in front of the cursor, which flashes up and down, so there is an abbreviation, usually IF, so I know it is an input field and in front of it there is name first name , that fits so nicely. If it's something long, I usually just get the cursor placed in the input field and the Braille display shows me so that I know I have to enter text here and before that the last few words or characters of the form label. For example, if it says: "Have you applied for EU funds in the last few months?" and then something like "Part of the EU applies for question mark" input field. OK, and then I have to scroll back a bit, Braille displays usually have thumb buttons or some kind of procedure where you can stay on the display with your reading fingers, mostly index finger, middle finger, and you can then scroll up with your thumb move down left right so that everything is very ergonomic. And if the Braille display perhaps even has an input keyboard, then you can actually work really nicely without having to constantly keep moving and wave your hands around.

And these form objects and much more are usually abbreviated on the Braille display as IF for input field, then an x in square brackets if it is there, then I know, ah there is a tick, so there is a checkbox filled in with yes or with applicable or something like that, if there's just square brackets on empty squares, then I know, okay, the check mark isn't checked, things like that are. And things like heading level 3 are usually shortened to 3 or H 3, depending on the language and so on. And as I said, I also really like the fact that meta information can be configured wherever possible with voice output. I really enjoy doing this. I often work with the screen reader that I use so that as much of this information as possible is not announced to me out loud, but rather through a sound. For me, a certain clicking sound in Word is the sign: A paragraph ends here, so there is a paragraph marker, the screen reader doesn't say paragraph mark, I've gotten used to that, but it clicks. There is a certain sound sequence when there is a heading and so on.

Contracted Braille on the computer is not so practical

Domingos: There is a summarized version of Braille that can also make the whole thing easier, i.e. the so-called Contracted Braille as opposed to full braille. Maybe you can say a couple of sentences about it.

Aleksander: Yes, the font takes up a lot of space. So, especially in printed form, it is of course also important that the Braille publications, the books, the folders, the notebooks - depending on how they are bound or filed - take up a lot of space. What might otherwise be a compact paperback for sighted people quickly becomes 3 or 4 thick volumes for us. And in order to tame the whole thing a little bit, Contracted Braille was invented very early on, Braille will soon be 200 years old, invented in 1825 by the brilliant Louis Braille, who himself went blind at the age of 16, and was not satisfied with that you can somehow make the normal letters tactile. This means that you can decipher a word, but it is impossible to read very long texts. And he simply figured out that the solution to the riddle is that if a letter fits under the tip of your finger, then you can read quickly. He then researched around until he came up with the trick with the 6 dots. Now in the computer age there are 8 for additional information, which is just okay, with 8 or 6 being really ideal. But letter by letter, it takes up a lot of space very quickly. And then a few decades after Louis Braille, you can come up with the idea of using various abbreviation variants to make German Contracted Braille the first to deserve the name. It came in 1904 and has now retained some of its basic features through several reforms. There are a few signs that have been in effect since 1904, but of course there are fewer and fewer, but something has been changed every now and then. The last reform came into force in 2018. And yes, the Contracted Braille shortens quite a bit depending on the genre of the text, sometimes more or less, because many of these shortenings somehow also affect words like politics and society and democrat and things like that, whole parts of words are shortened quite a lot then there are. Syllable abbreviations for ER and EM and all of these syllables that often occur in German and this combination of syllable abbreviations word part and word abbreviations naturally ensures that once you have learned the somewhat complicated rules of Contracted Braille, you may read faster also and that too. There is more space on a Braille display or in a line on a piece of paper and so the word democracy, for example, actually consists of 3 characters in Contracted Braille, that's it. That and on the computer you can also switch to Contracted Braille display. I don't do that that often because that's when. I kind of like that. So in the file explorer I have to do with file names and file extensions and with websites with URLs with links and with any email addresses and so on. Then anyway, in Contracted Braille it switches to a computerized display and then it's nicer I read it directly in the full form without these on and off signs and so on, only if I know now I will read a normal continuous text on the computer for a longer period of time, a newspaper article or something like that for half an hour or more. Then I switch to the Contracted Braille.

How many blind people know Braille

Domingos: What may be of interest: I don't think we have exact numbers, but do you know roughly how many people have mastered Braille to such an extent that they can read with meaning, i.e. a little more than medication packaging, and do you also know how many people know how to use Braille?

Aleksander: There are very few really reliable statistics about how many people who are blind have mastered Braille to such an extent that they can actually read sometimes, maybe even pick up a magazine or something like that. There are numbers like this that always hover around 15%, which is shockingly low, so you could say the other way around: 85% of blind people have in quotation marks no writing at all. So, of course, they can have things read to them, as I said, without any problem, and maybe they can also write blindly on the keyboard, which is supposed to be the case anyway. All of this is possible, but you can't really read Braille yourself. So 15% braille mastery is roughly assumed. Some say 20%, some say 12. Maybe it's a bit of a question of definition: What does it mean to be able to read? But if we say, that it doesn't exactly sound like it did in the first grade of elementary school, in the first few weeks, but rather read a little faster and can read aloud a little bit, then maybe we're somewhere in that 15%. And most of them are probably quite experienced and quite willing and quite quick readers, so they say yes, that interests me too and I might use that in my job. A lot of people will then rely on Contracted Braille, although the trend towards Contracted Braille is no longer as strong in the German-speaking world as it was 30 - 40 years ago. Braille has faced a lot of competition from everything that can be heard. And perhaps there is the incentive that you can read larger amounts of literature or even text using Contracted Braille. Maybe even in the libraries, in the form of printed editions, there is still a lot in Contracted Braille, so the incentive is no longer so big That why you should learn Contracted Braille now or so that you can read a little faster. Then you might just stick with the full fonts in the Computer Brei edition, i.e. a variant of the unabridged Braille edition. And that’s enough for everyday life. This means that Contracted Braille no longer has the same importance. I heard from a blind teacher in Munich over 50 years ago: Yes, Contracted Braille is a bit not for everyone, it's a bit of an elite script. But it has to be said that back then 50 years ago, people with learning difficulties were able to create astonishing, sparkling-clean handwriting in Contracted Braille, i.e. when writing, even on the Braille typewriter on paper. Today I still sometimes get letters from people who are now perhaps 60 - 70 years old, who learned this back then, who perhaps have just managed to get a secondary school diploma, but write great, often better and less in quotation marks careless or sloppy, than some high school graduates can do today. But of course there is simply a different type of quick writing today. Today I can just hit the keys and make corrections later, maybe I'm too lazy to do that sometimes, but I can do it. And something is already changing. And Contracted Braille is no longer in use in some countries. I have a lot of contacts in the Slavic countries. There are still a few people in Poland who still know this, who once learned it and simply use it as a hobby because they are enthusiastic about it. But it's no longer in the curriculum at all, it's no longer in use and that's how it is in many countries.

Domingos: Is Contracted Braille still taught in Germany?

Aleksander: Yes, Contracted Braille is taught in Germany, both in the institutions that support blind and visually impaired schools, as far as they exist and, let me say provocatively, have not yet fallen victim to the ideology of inclusion. Maybe more about that then.

Contracted Braille usually starts in the fifth grade. Otherwise, in an inclusive special education setting, when mobile teachers come and work on Braille with the children and young people in regular schools, then Contracted Braille often falls down and is no longer taught. Maybe just in passing. Depending on who comes there, as a teacher, who is very committed themselves, who may be affected themselves, they have a completely different emotional approach. They say: Contracted Braille has helped me so much, I'll definitely show it to you. Whether you'll use it is another question, but I don't want to withhold it from you. Overall, this is of course decreasing a bit now, in addition to the fact that Braille is no longer the only way to get information if you are blind.

The responsibility of the screen reader

Domingos: Thank you for the insight. Final question: Are there things that someone who is responsible for websites or PDFs or whatever can do to improve the presentation in Braille or should you concentrate on the speech output or are there any influences at all or do you see this more in the duty of the screen reader manufacturer?

Aleksander: I see that in the setting options for the screen readers. There is also a lot of urgent need for optimization. This now particularly applies to the iOS mobile operating system. When it comes to Android, I can't say in detail how good this brailback is now, I haven't had it under my fingers for a long time. The problem with I OS is that the Braille display is essentially simply a speech output other than on Windows.

So I basically just get on the Braille display what actually comes through the speech outputm. I once had a very strange experience. An app developer apparently wanted to ensure that the voice output pronounced something correctly, in this case it was the word livestream. He wanted to make sure of it. He probably wouldn't have done that at all, but the app developer wanted to prevent that and somehow made sure that the text was voice over at that point. Live stream. That was somehow spelled LAIF. Sharp STRI. M I believe something like that. Livestream was said perfectly, the catch was exactly how the word was then displayed on the braille display, so these are teething problems that have probably been overcome now, but with I OS you can get all of these information in quite a lot of detail "Double tap to open" and so on, all of these things appear briefly, depending on how long the message remains on the braille display, either until you click away or for a certain number of seconds and that's a bit annoying.

There is no difference to be made in terms of the accessibility of documents, apps and websites, so that you would have to do it differently now for general presentation. The principles apply, for example, really sensible work with headings or in word processing with format templates for lists and numbering, the correct marking of tables, images need alternative text, all these things that are necessary and they ensure that this is also the case braille is presented correctly.

Domingos: Thank you for your time and good luck with your work.