Braille on the outside of the changing table at church

[pne]

At church, in the mens’ room, there’s a changing table, where you can change your child’s nappies.

Recently, I noticed that there was some Braille on the outside. I made a handwritten note of what it said, in case I never got around to photographing it:

though a short while later, I got around to photographing it:

Click on either link to go to that picture’s page on Flickr, from where you can access other sizes if you want to see either picture larger. The second picture page also has a transcription of the Braille.

Comments

[kake]

Why's the translation all scrambled?

[pne.livejournal.com]

That’s “ASCII Braille”—where each Braille cell is represented by one ASCII character. If you formatted it with a suitable font such as SimBraille, you’d see the appropriate Braille cells. It’s the encoding typically used for English-language Braille distributed by computer, as far as I know.

It looks scrambled because the sign is in Grade 2 Braille—that is, it uses abbreviations to conserve space (for example, ] represents dots-12456, which represents the letters er). That’s almost a must for Braille, since it takes up so much space to begin with, but not everybody can read Grade 2 Braille. Grade 1 (uncontracted) Braille would be a lot more readable in ASCII form, since all the letters would be written out and you’d basically only have to puzzle out punctuation (e.g. 4 for a Braille full stop).

There’s a “proper” transcription beneath the ASCII Braille one.

[kake]

That's fascinating. Thank you!

[leora.livejournal.com]

What I find weird is when I spot Braille errors. I know of two in my community.

Braille errors

[pne.livejournal.com]

Two whats? Errors in Braille signage near you?

Re: Braille errors

[leora.livejournal.com]

Yup, two mistakes. One at the library informing me of a dooo that should remain closed, and what at my lothario's school, where the room number is wrong. The latter case is weird, the pips appear to have been removed, turning a 4 into a 1. You can see where they used to be, but they've been filed down or something. I do wonder why and how that happened.