[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ever wanted to look at yourself in Braille?
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Ever wanted to look at yourself in Braille?
Author : cat-whisperer
Score : 19 points
Date : 2026-01-09 07:43 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| d-lisp wrote:
| Are there blind users of hackernews here that could answer to the
| probably stupid question:
|
| Would you be able to "perceive" a picture if that picture was
| engraved on a surface ?
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| Not blind, and can't speak to how popular or useful they are,
| but there are products meant to be used like that [0]. I can't
| find the link but I've also seen this done with paintings,
| where someone creates essentially a sculpture based on a
| painting, and then they can 3D print it so a blind person could
| "see" something like the Mona Lisa or Starry Night.
|
| A while ago I read a biography of Louis Braille, and he created
| his system to replace an older one where they would teach
| people to feel the shape of letters in wooden blocks. Braille
| replaced it because it was much easier to read fast, but it was
| never meant to be used for something like a picture.
|
| I'd also be interested if something like a tactile floor plan
| would even be useful for someone blind from birth, from what
| I've heard you don't think about navigating spaces the same
| way, so a floor plan might be far away from the mental models
| they use.
|
| [0]: https://evengrounds.com/services/tactile-3d-printed-
| models-f...
| d-lisp wrote:
| Sometimes I draw UML-like diagrams when I join a project (and
| when the project is big enough in such a way my mind melts if
| I try to keep track of everything), I wonder if there are
| equivalent representations of such things.
|
| Linear text is perfect to me for documentation,
| teaching/learning etc...
|
| But also, systems seems to be better digested under the shape
| of spatial representations (I met a lot of CS persons that
| fantasized over the possibility of displaying all the files
| of your codebase in a VR-like environment augmented with
| visual cues (UML) and I must admit that I would find this
| unnecessary but comfortable -- and I can imagine applications
| of this in other domains; imagine a teacher arranging the
| whole of Kant philosophy as a spatial-visual system
| referencing positions, comments, etc..). Eyes are cool
| because you can focus on something while knowing that some
| available information is there around the zone you are
| focusing; in a sense, so is the hand, locally, but I imagine
| (I dont know) it would require some super-human level of
| braille reading to be able to jump back and forth reading on
| different fingers, so that's again a probably stupid question
| to ask to the blind crowd of hn : are you able to do this?
| password4321 wrote:
| evengrounds.com mentioned recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46502269#46547839
| smkelly wrote:
| This does not look like Braille to me. Braille is a system that
| uses cells composed of six (or eight) dots. This is just dots
| strewn all over the place.
|
| Reminds me of this relatively new device in the space though:
| https://store.humanware.com/hca/monarch-the-1st-dynamic-tact...
| wazbug wrote:
| stupid. maybe post something you actually made instead of telling
| a computer to make.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-13 23:01 UTC)