I coined this name to refer to the lack of any pattern. Braille signage (and/or raised lettering on printed signs) is useful to people who can’t see well enough for visual text, yet almost invisible to people who can. It’s very elegant!
This seems like a good place to ask something I’ve always wondered about Braille on elevated signs: how do blind people… know where the sign is and that they should touch it to read the Braille on it?
They obviously can’t see the sign, and it’s not on the floor where any cane or foot might touch it normally, and the signs emit no noise they can hear to be alerted about it, and while sign locations may be standardized they do not appear to be so universally present (like light switches) that groping around blindly on the walls of every corridor would be reasonable to do everywhere you go in case there is a sign. They would appear to be about as useless to blind people as Braille-less signs, and for the same reason.
And if you have to ask someone sighted if/where any Braille-containing sign was, then the sign would seem to be largely pointless in that scenario too. (“Excuse me, where’s the men’s bathroom sign?” “Oh, it’s over there, 5 feet to your left, forward 10 feet, up 4.5 feet on the wall, right next to the unisex bathroom door. Grope around for a while, you can’t miss it. But try not to hit anyone walking in and out of our bathroom.” “Great, thanks. Incidentally, what does the sign say?” “It says ‘unisex bathroom’.”)
I’ve only ever read a little bit about this but my understanding is:
Much of what you say is right, and braille signage is not a perfect and comprehensive solution to accessibility for all blind people, but
It’s still useful because public spaces are designed with a lot of regularities that make it not-that-hard to predict where signage will be, especially given that
Many blind people are unbelievably good at exploring unfamiliar spaces, relative to what a sighted person might imagine.
Speaking of which, I wonder if multi-modal transformers have started being used by blind people yet. Since we have models that can describe images, I wonder if it would be useful for blind people to have a device with a camera and a microphone and a little button one can press to get it to describe what the camera is seeing. Surely there are startups working on this?
Actually, that is a common misconception. Most “blind” people are not fully blind (based on a few google searches only 10-15% are fully blind) and can make out rough shapes and objects. They could be able to identify a rectangular sign, but might not be able to recognize the written symbols and thus the Braille is helpful.
This seems like a good place to ask something I’ve always wondered about Braille on elevated signs: how do blind people… know where the sign is and that they should touch it to read the Braille on it?
They obviously can’t see the sign, and it’s not on the floor where any cane or foot might touch it normally, and the signs emit no noise they can hear to be alerted about it, and while sign locations may be standardized they do not appear to be so universally present (like light switches) that groping around blindly on the walls of every corridor would be reasonable to do everywhere you go in case there is a sign. They would appear to be about as useless to blind people as Braille-less signs, and for the same reason.
And if you have to ask someone sighted if/where any Braille-containing sign was, then the sign would seem to be largely pointless in that scenario too. (“Excuse me, where’s the men’s bathroom sign?” “Oh, it’s over there, 5 feet to your left, forward 10 feet, up 4.5 feet on the wall, right next to the unisex bathroom door. Grope around for a while, you can’t miss it. But try not to hit anyone walking in and out of our bathroom.” “Great, thanks. Incidentally, what does the sign say?” “It says ‘unisex bathroom’.”)
I’ve only ever read a little bit about this but my understanding is:
Much of what you say is right, and braille signage is not a perfect and comprehensive solution to accessibility for all blind people, but
It’s still useful because public spaces are designed with a lot of regularities that make it not-that-hard to predict where signage will be, especially given that
Many blind people are unbelievably good at exploring unfamiliar spaces, relative to what a sighted person might imagine.
Speaking of which, I wonder if multi-modal transformers have started being used by blind people yet. Since we have models that can describe images, I wonder if it would be useful for blind people to have a device with a camera and a microphone and a little button one can press to get it to describe what the camera is seeing. Surely there are startups working on this?
Yes. See Be my AI.
Why the retrofuturistic description of a smartphone?
Cool, Facebook is also on this apparently: https://x.com/PicturesFoIder/status/1840677517553791440
Actually, that is a common misconception. Most “blind” people are not fully blind (based on a few google searches only 10-15% are fully blind) and can make out rough shapes and objects. They could be able to identify a rectangular sign, but might not be able to recognize the written symbols and thus the Braille is helpful.