Hi Charles:

In the words of the Borg, "braille is irrelevant." Lol!

Seriously, though, you have a point. If the technology fails a person
who was totally dependent on it would be sunk. However, using braille
is still none-the-less an impractical method of reading and writing,
because it is impossible to store braille books, notes, or documents
of any kind in a standard mid sized apartment.

I remember several years ago I had a complete bible in braille. It was
30 very large volumes in braille that seemed to weigh a ton each.  The
entire book took up the entire top shelf of a very large bookcase.
Now, a standard print bible is large, but can fit nicely on a
bookcase, on someone's coffee table, end table, and there are of
course even small print versions compact enough to fit in a persons
coat pocket. You can not do that with braille, but you can do it with
electronic formats like text, epub, html, or whatever.

I recognize you are a fan of braille, and I won't put you down for
making that choice. I will, however, question how much you have
considered it from a practicality point of view. It is extremely
expensive to braille documentation, let alone a book as big as the
bible, and even when a person makes that book they need something like
a small warehouse to store it because it takes a lot of room to store
complete braille books.

To give you another example right now I have about 305 Star Wars books
in epub format. I can fit the entire collection on a DVD, put it in my
computer, and read them in Mozilla Firefox using the epub add-on. It
is both very portable and the cost per book was actually quite
inexpensive for me since buying electronic books is less than the cost
of a paperback or hardback book in print.

Now, let's assume I wanted to buy that entire collection in braille.
The cost of all 305 books would probably be measured in the thousands.
The cost of the braille paper, the binders, etc alone would make it
more expensive to produce let alone labor costs. Once I purchased all
305 books I would still need a room to store them in. Since I live in
a small apartment I would simply have nowhere to put all those braille
books. So I have to question how practical braille is in today's
society where technology appears to me to have a lot more advantages
over braille both in terms of cost as well as the ability to store as
much documentation as I want.

Cheers!


On 12/11/13, Charles Rivard <[email protected]> wrote:
> Become dependent on technology.  Technology fails.  You're sunk.  Nobody or
>
> nothing does your reading for you.  Use braille.
>
> ---
> Be positive!  When it comes to being defeated, if you think you're finished,
>
> you! really! are! finished!

---
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