Music at Your Fingertips: Stimulating Braille Reading by Association with Sound

Abstract

Driven by the ongoing integration of computers into the daily lives of blind people, the reading experience has been undergoing a significant shift from Braille to synthetic speech. While it is true that speech involves less effort on the part of the reader, the downside is that it creates the illusion of completeness of information while in truth many important elements of layout, punctuation, and spelling are lost. The presentation introduces an application of Active Tactile Control which revolves around the medium of music and is designed in such a way that students can only succeed if they mentally translate auditive impressions into Braille characters.