In 1960, 50% of legally blind, school-age children were able to read Braille in the U.S. According to the 2007 Annual Report from the American Printing House for the Blind, there are approximately 57,696 legally blind children in the U.S. Out of those school-age children, only 10% use Braille as their primary reading medium. (Wikipedia)
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.
Design group DESIGN 21 recently had a Game Changers Competition for global game design. You know who won this contest? Danielle Pecora. The project Pecora entered and won this contest with was the “be-B: Braille Education Ball,” a method for both blind and sighted users to learn the Braille system using a challenging and educational game.
The be-B consists of a ball and 26 magnetically attached pegs. One one side of each peg is a letter from the modern latin alphabet, on the other is the corresponding Braille character. Each of these pegs has a matching hole in the ball. The object of the game, as you may have guessed, is to match up each of the letters with its corresponding hole. Each time a peg is placed in a hole, and that hole is correct, a chime sounds and the name of the letter is “spoken.”
Source Yanko Design
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