Tucked away for decades in an old library. Never offered on the market until now. Musical characters used by the seeing : with explanations. Boston : Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind, 1879.
Text printed in Boston Line Type; the musical characters are raised versions of conventional musical notation. Stain to lower right corner causing browning to page corners. If you collect 19th century American imprints, Americana sight / blind related, music history or musicology, education, etc. This is a treasure you will not see again!Add this to your paper or ephemera collection. Boston line letter was a tactile writing system created by Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe in 1835, a popular precursor to the now-standardized Braille.
Example of Boston Line Letter at the Museum of the American Printing House for the Blind. Samuel Gridley Howe, the first director of the New England Asylum for the Blind (now Perkins School for the Blind), studied tactile printing systems in Europe and developed his own system of raised type called Boston line letter. Howe's system was similar to raised letters designed by James Gall in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1820s. [1] In 1835 Howe printed Acts of the Apostles, the first book produced in Boston line letter. The letterforms were an angular modification of Roman letters and had no capital letters. The first books embossed at the American Printing House for the Blind in 1866 were in Boston line letter. A printer in Philadelphia, had adapted what became known as a "combined system" which used the lower case forms of Boston line letter and capital letters from a rival tactile system known as Philadelphia Line. [2] Until replaced by dot systems this hybrid form of raised letters was the predominant embossed type for blind people in the United States and the choice of most of the schools.Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts, is the oldest school for the blind in the United States. It has also been known as the Perkins Institution for the Blind. Perkins manufactures its own Perkins Brailler, which is used to print embossed, tactile books for the blind;[2] and the Perkins SMART Brailler, a braille teaching tool, at the Perkins Solutions division[3] housed within the Watertown campus's former Howe Press.
The Howe Building Tower from afar on Perkins School for the Blind's campus, in Watertown, Massachusetts. Founded in 1829, Perkins was the first school for the blind established in the United States. [4] The school was originally named the New England Asylum for the Blind and was incorporated on March 2, 1829. The name was eventually changed to Perkins School For the Blind. John Dix Fisher first considered the idea of a school for blind children based upon his visits to Paris at the National Institute for the Blind and was inspired to create such a school in Boston. In 1833, the school outgrew the Pleasant Street house of the father of its founder Samuel Gridley Howe, and Perkins donated his Pearl Street mansion as the school's second home. This property was home to both Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. The school moved to its present campus, in Watertown, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1912.Charles Dickens visited Perkins in 1842 during a lecture tour of America and was amazed at the work Howe was doing with Laura Bridgman, a deaf-blind girl who had come to the school in 1837 from New Hampshire. He wrote about his visit in his book, American Notes. In 1887, Perkins director Michael Anagnos sent graduate Anne Sullivan to teach Helen Keller in Alabama.
In 1931, Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library (BTBL) was created. In 1951, David Abraham successfully produced the first Perkins Brailler. By 1977, about 100,000 Perkins Braillers had been produced and distributed worldwide. In the 21st century, Perkins has expanded its mission online to include resources for families with blind and visually impaired children, [6] and teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs). [7] Perkins has also worked with its local partners in Asian countries to host an online community for educators, caregivers and families.
In 2011, Perkins completed construction of the Grousbeck Center for Students and Technology on its 38-acre campus in Watertown, Massachusetts. This facility houses accessible technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The most recent project in Watertown for visually impaired persons is the "Braille Trail", which was completed in July 2016. Perkins partners with local groups in 67 countriesschools, universities, NGOs, nonprofits, government agencies, and parent networksto educate and empower people who are blind, deafblind or visually impaired, who may have additional disabilities. [11] The organization does this through disseminating resources, such as Perkins Braillers, funding and expertise on the ground in these countries.
One such example of this work in the African countries of Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya is Perkins' role in the Kilimanjaro Blind Trust, Inc. Special educators from other countries are also invited to the Watertown campus every year, for an intensive study of blindness and multiple-disability education, which they then bring back to their respective regions. Perkins Solutions concentrates on a broad array of assistive technology and accessibility assessment, training, and consulting. The range of Perkins Braillers ships to 175 countries and includes the Classic Brailler, the Next Generation Brailler and the Smart Brailler launched in 2012 with text-to-speech output, visual display, and applications for teaching braille.
This subsidiary of Perkins also partners with associations for the blind and partially sighted, education ministers and resellers around the globe in an effort to provide accessible equipmentincluding Perkins Braillers, brailler repair and assistive technologyto all who need it. On May 5, 2016, Perkins launched BlindNewWorld, [15] a social change campaign aimed at helping the sighted population to be more inclusive of people who are blind and to make the world more accessible to them. National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program. On June 8, 2012, in conjunction with the Helen Keller National Center (HKNC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Perkins School for the Blind was selected to conduct nationwide outreach for the National Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program (NDBEDP). Mandated by the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) and established by the FCC, the NDBEDP will aid individuals with combined vision and hearing loss connect with family, friends and their community by distributing accessible communications technology.Perkins' and partners' outreach campaign to educate people on this program is called iCanConnect, [17] which will aim to inform the nearly one million people in the United States with some sort of combined hearing and vision loss on the types of equipmente. Screen-enlargement software, video phones and electronic refreshable braille displays[18]available to them free of charge. Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library works in conjunction with the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) at its Watertown chapter.
Perkins has collaborated with the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired on a Web resource called PathsToLiteracy. Org, an online hub for information related to literacy for students who are blind or visually impaired, including those with additional disabilities or deafblindness. Perkins has collaborated with Amy Bower, a blind oceanographer and senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, to show students what it's like to be a blind scientist. The international nonprofit has also worked in conjunction with the American Foundation for the Blind to ensure that Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) be taught in mainstream schools. Perkins is a member Council of Schools for the Blind. Smith, musician and the first blind graduate of Harvard. Robert Smithdas, the first deafblind person to earn a masters degree. Anne Sullivan, teacher of Helen Keller. Braille /brel/ (Braille: ; French: [baj]) is a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired. It is traditionally written with embossed paper. Braille users can read computer screens and other electronic supports using refreshable braille displays. They can write braille with the original slate and stylus or type it on a braille writer, such as a portable braille notetaker or computer that prints with a braille embosser. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a childhood accident. In 1824, at the age of fifteen, he developed a code for the French alphabet as an improvement on night writing.He published his system, which subsequently included musical notation, in 1829. [1] The second revision, published in 1837, was the first binary form of writing developed in the modern era. These characters have rectangular blocks called cells that have tiny bumps called raised dots. The number and arrangement of these dots distinguish one character from another.
Since the various braille alphabets originated as transcription codes for printed writing, the mappings (sets of character designations) vary from language to language, and even within one; in English Braille there are three levels of encoding: Grade 1 a letter-by-letter transcription used for basic literacy; Grade 2 an addition of abbreviations and contractions; and Grade 3 various non-standardized personal stenography. Braille cells are not the only thing to appear in braille text.There may be embossed illustrations and graphs, with the lines either solid or made of series of dots, arrows, bullets that are larger than braille dots, etc. A full braille cell includes six raised dots arranged in two columns, each column having three dots.
[2] The dot positions are identified by numbers from one to six. [2] There are 64 possible combinations, including no dots at all for a word space. [3] A cell can be used to represent a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or even a word.
Braille literacy is a social-justice issue. [4] Early braille education is crucial to literacy, education and employment among the blind. However, in the face of changes in education policy and screen reader software, braille usage has declined in recent decades, despite the fact that technologies such as braille displays have also made braille more accessible and practical. The Braille code where the word. (premier, French for "first") can be read.
Braille was based on a tactile military code called night writing, developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without a light source. [5] In Barbier's system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch and was rejected by the military. In 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole 12-dot symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another.
Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. [6] At first, Braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions, and even logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand. [7] The expanded English system, called Grade-2 Braille, was completed by 1905. For blind readers, Braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography.
Braille is derived from the Latin alphabet, albeit indirectly. In Braille's original system, the dot patterns were assigned to letters according to their position within the alphabetic order of the French alphabet, with accented letters and w sorted at the end. The first ten letters of the alphabet, aj, use the upper four dot positions: (black dots in the table below). These stand for the ten digits 19 and 0 in an alphabetic numeral system similar to Greek numerals (as well all derivations of it, including Hebrew numerals, Cyrillic numerals, Abjad numerals, also Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy). Though the dots are assigned in no obvious order, the cells with the fewest dots are assigned to the first three letters (and lowest digits), abc = 123 , and to the three vowels in this part of the alphabet, aei , whereas the even digits, 4, 6, 8, 0 , are corners/right angles. The next ten letters, kt, are identical to aj, respectively, apart from the addition of a dot at position 3 (red dots in the table below). Derivation (colored dots) of the 26 braille letters of the Basic Latin alphabet. From the 10 numeric digits (black dots). The next ten letters (the next "decade") are the same again, but with dots also at both position 3 and position 6 (green dots in the table above). Here w was left out as not being a part of the official French alphabet at the time of Braille's life; the French braille order is u v x y z ç é à è ù. The next ten letters, ending in w, are the same again, except that for this series position 6 (purple dot in the table above) is used without a dot at position 3.In French braille these are the letters â ê î ô û ë ï ü ö w. W had been tacked onto the end of 39 letters of the French alphabet to accommodate English.
The aj series shifted down by one dot space is used for punctuation. Letters a and c , which only use dots in the top row, were shifted two places for the apostrophe and hyphen. These are also the decade diacritics, at left in the table below, of the second and third decade. In addition, there are ten patterns that are based on the first two letters with their dots shifted to the right; these were assigned to non-French letters (ì ä ò), or serve non-letter functions: (superscript; in English the accent mark), (currency prefix), (capital, in English the decimal point), (number sign), (emphasis mark), (symbol prefix).
The 64 modern braille cells[note 2]. Originally there had been nine decades. The fifth through ninth used dashes as well as dots, but proved to be impractical and were soon abandoned. These could be replaced with what we now know as the number sign , though that only caught on for the digits (old 5th decade modern 1st decade).
The dash occupying the top row of the original sixth decade was simply dropped, producing the modern fifth decade. Historically, there have been three principles in assigning the values of a linear script (print) to Braille: Using Louis Braille's original French letter values; reassigning the braille letters according to the sort order of the print alphabet being transcribed; and reassigning the letters to improve the efficiency of writing in braille. Under international consensus, most braille alphabets follow the French sorting order for the 26 letters of the basic Latin alphabet, and there have been attempts at unifying the letters beyond these 26 (see international braille), though differences remain, for example in German Braille and the contractions of English Braille. This unification avoids the chaos of each nation reordering the braille code to match the sorting order of its print alphabet, as happened in Algerian Braille, where braille codes were numerically reassigned to match the order of the Arabic alphabet and bear little relation to the values used in other countries (compare modern Arabic Braille, which uses the French sorting order), and as happened in an early American version of English Braille, where the letters w, x, y, z were reassigned to match English alphabetical order. A convention sometimes seen for letters beyond the basic 26 is to exploit the physical symmetry of braille patterns iconically, for example, by assigning a reversed n to ñ or an inverted s to sh. See Hungarian Braille and Bharati Braille, which do this to some extent. A third principle was to assign braille codes according to frequency, with the simplest patterns (quickest ones to write with a stylus) assigned to the most frequent letters of the alphabet. Such frequency-based alphabets were used in Germany and the United States in the 19th century (see American Braille), but with the invention of the braille typewriter their advantage disappeared, and none are attested in modern use they had the disadvantage that the resulting small number of dots in a text interfered with following the alignment of the letters, and consequently made texts more difficult to read than Braille's more arbitrary letter-assignment.Finally, there are braille scripts which don't order the codes numerically at all, such as Japanese Braille and Korean Braille, which are based on more abstract principles of syllable composition. Academic texts are sometimes written in a script of eight dots per cell rather than six, enabling them to encode a greater number of symbols. Luxembourgish Braille has adopted eight-dot cells for general use; for example, it adds a dot below each letter to derive its capital variant.
Silver wedding bands with names Henri(que) and Tita written in braille. Braille was the first writing system with binary encoding. [7] The system as devised by Braille consists of two parts:[8]. Character encoding that mapped characters of the French alphabet to tuples of six bits (the dots). The physical representation of those six-bit characters with raised dots in a braille cell.
Within an individual cell, the dot positions are arranged in two columns of three positions. A raised dot can appear in any of the six positions, producing sixty-four (26) possible patterns, including one in which there are no raised dots. For reference purposes, a pattern is commonly described by listing the positions where dots are raised, the positions being universally numbered, from top to bottom, as 1 to 3 on the left and 4 to 6 on the right.
For example, dot pattern 1-3-4 describes a cell with three dots raised, at the top and bottom in the left column and at the top of the right column: that is, the letter m. The lines of horizontal Braille text are separated by a space, much like visible printed text, so that the dots of one line can be differentiated from the braille text above and below. Different assignments of braille codes (or code pages) are used to map the character sets of different printed scripts to the six-bit cells. Braille assignments have also been created for mathematical and musical notation. However, because the six-dot braille cell allows only 64 (26) patterns, including space, the characters of a braille script commonly have multiple values, depending on their context.
That is, character mapping between print and braille is not one-to-one. For example, the character corresponds in print to both the letter d and the digit 4. In addition to simple encoding, many braille alphabets use contractions to reduce the size of braille texts and to increase reading speed. Lucy Sergent, 26-year-old daughter of a Kentucky coal miner, writing with a slate and stylus in 1946.
Blind from birth, she attended the Kentucky School for the Blind for 11 years. Braille may be produced by hand using a slate and stylus in which each dot is created from the back of the page, writing in mirror image, or it may be produced on a braille typewriter or Perkins Brailler, or an electronic Brailler or eBrailler. Because braille letters cannot be effectively erased and written over if an error is made, an error is overwritten with all six dots.
Interpoint refers to braille printing that is offset, so that the paper can be embossed on both sides, with the dots on one side appearing between the divots that form the dots on the other. Using a computer or other electronic device, Braille may be produced with a braille embosser (printer) or a refreshable braille display (screen).
Braille has been extended to an 8-dot code, particularly for use with braille embossers and refreshable braille displays. In 8-dot braille the additional dots are added at the bottom of the cell, giving a matrix 4 dots high by 2 dots wide. The additional dots are given the numbers 7 (for the lower-left dot) and 8 (for the lower-right dot). Eight-dot braille has the advantages that the case of an individual letter is directly coded in the cell containing the letter and that all the printable ASCII characters can be represented in a single cell. All 256 (28) possible combinations of 8 dots are encoded by the Unicode standard.
Braille with six dots is frequently stored as Braille ASCII. The first 25 braille letters, up through the first half of the 3rd decade, transcribe az (skipping w).In English Braille, the rest of that decade is rounded out with the ligatures and, for, of, the, and with. Omitting dot 3 from these forms the 4th decade, the ligatures ch, gh, sh, th, wh, ed, er, ou, ow and the letter w. Various formatting marks affect the values of the letters that follow them. They have no direct equivalent in print. The most important in English Braille are.
That is, is read as capital'A', and as the digit'1'. Basic punctuation marks in English Braille include. Is both the question mark and the opening quotation mark. Its reading depends on whether it occurs before a word or after. Is used for both opening and closing parentheses. Its placement relative to spaces and other characters determines its interpretation. Punctuation varies from language to language. For example, French Braille uses for its question mark and swaps the quotation marks and parentheses (to and); it uses the period for the decimal point, as in print, and the decimal point to mark capitalization. For a full list of abbreviations and contractions in English, see English Braille § Contractions. Braille contractions are words and affixes that are shortened so that they take up fewer cells.In English Braille, for example, the word afternoon is written with just three letters, afn, much like stenoscript. There are also several abbreviation marks that create what are effectively logograms.
[8] The most common of these is dot 5, which combines with the first letter of words. With the letter m, the resulting word is mother. There are also ligatures ("contracted" letters), which are single letters in braille but correspond to more than one letter in print. The letter and, for example, is used to write words with the sequence a-n-d in them, such as hand. (braille pattern dots-1) (braille pattern dots-124) (braille pattern dots-1345).
(braille pattern dots-5) (braille pattern dots-134). (braille pattern dots-125) (braille pattern dots-12346).Most braille embossers support between 34 and 40 cells per line, and 25 lines per page. A manually operated Perkins braille typewriter supports a maximum of 42 cells per line (its margins are adjustable), and typical paper allows 25 lines per page.
A large interlining Stainsby has 36 cells per line and 18 lines per page. An A4-sized Marburg braille frame, which allows interpoint braille (dots on both sides of the page, offset so they do not interfere with each other), has 30 cells per line and 27 lines per page. File:An aesthetic braille typewriter video. Sliding carriage with keys on a metal plate. A Braille writing machine is a typewriter with six keys that allow to write in Braille alphabet on a regular white page.
The first Braille typewriter to gain general acceptance was invented by Frank Haven Hall (Superintendent of the Illinois School for the Blind), and was presented to the public in 1892. The Stainsby Brailler, developed by Henry Stainsby in 1903, is a mechanical writer with a sliding carriage that moves over an aluminium plate as it embosses Braille characters. An improved version was introduced around 1933. In 1951 David Abraham, a woodworking teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind produced a more advanced Braille typewriter, the Perkins Brailler.Braille printers or embosser were produced in 1950s. In 1960 Robert Mann, a teacher in MIT, wrote DOTSYS, a software that allowed automatic braille translation, and another group created an embossing device called M. The Mitre Corporation team of Robert Gildea, Jonathan Millen, Reid Gerhart and Joseph Sullivan (now president of Duxbury Systems) developed DOTSYS III, the first braille translator written in a portable programming language.
DOTSYS III was developed for the Atlanta Public Schools as a public domain program. In 1991 Ernest Bate developed the Mountbatten Brailler, an electronic machine used to type braille on braille paper, giving it a number of additional features such as word processing, audio feedback and embossing. This version was improved in 2008 with a quiet writer that had an erase key. Morgan produced the first SMART Brailler machine, with added text to speech function and allowed digital capture of data entered.Braille is usually read in printed forms such as paper books written in braille, braille public signals and also on Braille e-books. Currently more than 1% of all printed books have been translated into braille.
Although the finger can read only one braille character at a time, the brain chunks braille at a higher level, processing words a digraph, root or suffix at a time. The processing largely takes place in the visual cortex. Children who are blind not only have the educational disadvantage of not being able to see they also miss out on fundamental parts of early and advanced education if not provided with the necessary tools. Children who are blind or visually impaired can begin learning pre-braille skills from a very young age to become fluent braille readers as they get older. In 1960, 50% of legally blind, school-age children were able to read braille in the U.[19][20] According to the 2015 Annual Report from the American Printing House for the Blind, there were 61,739 legally blind students registered in the U. Of these, 8.6% (5,333) were registered as braille readers, 31% (19,109) as visual readers, 9.4% (5,795) as auditory readers, 17% (10,470) as pre-readers, and 34% (21,032) as non-readers. There are numerous causes for the decline in braille usage, including school budget constraints, technology advancements such as screen-reader software, and different philosophical views over how blind children should be educated. A key turning point for braille literacy was the passage of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, an act of Congress that moved thousands of children from specialized schools for the blind into mainstream public schools. [20] Because only a small percentage of public schools could afford to train and hire braille-qualified teachers, braille literacy has declined since the law took effect.
[clarification needed][20] Braille literacy rates have improved slightly since the bill was passed, [clarification needed] in part because of pressure from consumers and advocacy groups that has led 27 states to pass legislation mandating that children who are legally blind be given the opportunity to learn braille. In 1998 there were 57,425 legally blind students registered in the United States, but only 10% (5,461) of them used braille as their primary reading medium. Early Braille education is crucial to literacy for a blind or low-vision child. A study conducted in the state of Washington found that people who learned braille at an early age did just as well, if not better than their sighted peers in several areas, including vocabulary and comprehension.In the preliminary adult study, while evaluating the correlation between adult literacy skills and employment, it was found that 44% of the participants who had learned to read in braille were unemployed, compared to the 77% unemployment rate of those who had learned to read using print. [26] Currently, among the estimated 85,000 blind adults in the United States, 90% of those who are braille-literate are employed. Among adults who do not know braille, only 33% are employed. [20] Statistically, history has proven that braille reading proficiency provides an essential skill set that allows blind or low-vision children to compete with their sighted peers in a school environment and later in life as they enter the workforce. Though braille is thought to be the main way blind people read and write, in Britain (for example) out of the reported two million blind and low vision population, it is estimated that only around 15,00020,000 people use braille.
[27] Younger people are turning to electronic text on computers with screen reader software instead, a more portable communication method that they can use with their friends. A debate has started on how to make braille more attractive and for more teachers to be available to teach it.Braille on a box of tablets. The raised Braille reads'plavix'. Braille book and the same book in inkprint.
Although it is possible to transcribe print by simply substituting the equivalent braille character for its printed equivalent, in English such a character-by-character transcription (known as uncontracted braille) is only used by beginners. Braille characters are much larger than their printed equivalents, and the standard 11" by 11.5" (28 cm × 30 cm) page has room for only 25 lines of 43 characters. To reduce space and increase reading speed, most braille alphabets and orthographies use ligatures, abbreviations, and contractions. Virtually all English Braille books are transcribed in this contracted braille, which adds an additional layer of complexity to English orthography: The Library of Congress's Instruction Manual for Braille Transcribing[28] runs to over 300 pages and braille transcribers must pass certification tests.
Fully contracted braille is known as Grade 2 Braille. There is an intermediate form, called Grade 1 Braille, that is between Computer Braille (one-for-one identity with print) and Grade 2 Braille. In Grade 1 Braille, the capital sign and number sign are used, and most punctuation marks are shown using their Grade 2 values. The system of contractions in English Braille begins with a set of 23 words which are contracted to single characters. Thus the word but is contracted to the single letter b, can to c, do to d, and so on.Even this simple rule creates issues requiring special cases; for example, d is, specifically, an abbreviation of the verb do; the noun do representing the note of the musical scale is a different word, and must be spelled out. Portions of words may be contracted, and many rules govern this process. For example, the character with dots 2-3-5 (the letter "f" lowered in the Braille cell) stands for "ff" when used in the middle of a word. At the beginning of a word, this same character stands for the word "to"; the character is written in braille with no space following it.
This contraction was removed in the Unified English Braille Code. At the end of a word, the same character represents an exclamation point. Some contractions are more similar than their print equivalents. For example, the contraction lr, meaning'letter', differs from ll, meaning'little', only by one dot in the second letter: little, letter.This causes greater confusion between the braille spellings of these words and can hinder the learning process of contracted braille. The contraction rules take into account the linguistic structure of the word; thus, contractions are generally not to be used when their use would alter the usual braille form of a base word to which a prefix or suffix has been added.
Some portions of the transcription rules are not fully codified and rely on the judgment of the transcriber. Thus, when the contraction rules permit the same word in more than one way, preference is given to the contraction that more nearly approximates correct pronunciation.
Grade 3 Braille[30] is a variety of non-standardized systems that include many additional shorthand-like contractions. They are not used for publication, but by individuals for their personal convenience. When people produce braille, this is called braille transcription.
When computer software produces braille, this is called braille translation. Braille translation software exists to handle most of the common languages of the world, and many technical areas, such as mathematics (mathematical notation), for example WIMATS, music (musical notation), and tactile graphics. Since Braille is one of the few writing systems where tactile perception is used, as opposed to visual perception, a braille reader must develop new skills. One skill important for Braille readers is the ability to create smooth and even pressures when running one's fingers along the words. There are many different styles and techniques used for the understanding and development of braille, even though a study by B.
Holland[31] suggests that there is no specific technique that is superior to any other. Another study by Lowenfield & Abel[32] shows that braille can be read the fastest and best... By students who read using the index fingers of both hands. Another important reading skill emphasized in this study is to finish reading the end of a line with the right hand and to find the beginning of the next line with the left hand simultaneously. One final conclusion drawn by both Lowenfield and Abel is that children have difficulty using both hands independently where the right hand is the dominant hand.
But this hand preference does not correlate to other activities. Main article: International uniformity of braille. Braille plate at Duftrosengarten in Rapperswil, Switzerland. When Braille was first adapted to languages other than French, many schemes were adopted, including mapping the native alphabet to the alphabetical order of French e. In English W, which was not in the French alphabet at the time, is mapped to braille X, X to Y, Y to Z, and Z to the first French-accented letter or completely rearranging the alphabet such that common letters are represented by the simplest braille patterns.
Consequently, mutual intelligibility was greatly hindered by this state of affairs. In 1878, the International Congress on Work for the Blind, held in Paris, proposed an international braille standard, where braille codes for different languages and scripts would be based, not on the order of a particular alphabet, but on phonetic correspondence and transliteration to Latin. This unified braille has been applied to the languages of India and Africa, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hebrew, Russian, and Armenian, as well as nearly all Latin-script languages.
In Greek, for example, (g) is written as Latin g, despite the fact that it has the alphabetic position of c; Hebrew (b), the second letter of the alphabet and cognate with the Latin letter b, is sometimes pronounced /b/ and sometimes /v/, and is written b or v accordingly; Russian (ts) is written as c, which is the usual letter for /ts/ in those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet; and Arabic (f) is written as f, despite being historically p and occurring in that part of the Arabic alphabet (between historic o and q). Other systems for assigning values to braille patterns are also followed beside the simple mapping of the alphabetical order onto the original French order. Some braille alphabets start with unified braille, and then diverge significantly based on the phonology of the target languages, while others diverge even further. In the various Chinese systems, traditional braille values are used for initial consonants and the simple vowels.
In both Mandarin and Cantonese Braille, however, characters have different readings depending on whether they are placed in syllable-initial (onset) or syllable-final (rime) position. For instance, the cell for Latin k, , represents Cantonese k (g in Yale and other modern romanizations) when initial, but aak when final, while Latin j, , represents Cantonese initial j but final oei. Novel systems of braille mapping include Korean, which adopts separate syllable-initial and syllable-final forms for its consonants, explicitly grouping braille cells into syllabic groups in the same way as hangul.
Japanese, meanwhile, combines independent vowel dot patterns and modifier consonant dot patterns into a single braille cell an abugida representation of each Japanese mora. A bottle of Chapoutier wine, with braille on the label. An embossed map of a German train station, with braille text.
The current series of Canadian banknotes has a tactile feature consisting of raised dots that indicate the denomination, allowing bills to be easily identified by blind or low vision people. It does not use standard braille; rather, the feature uses a system developed in consultation with blind and low vision Canadians after research indicated that braille was not sufficiently robust and that not all potential users read braille. Mexican bank notes, Australian bank notes, Indian rupee notes, Israeli new shekel notes[34] and Russian ruble notes also have special raised symbols to make them identifiable by persons who are blind or low vision. In India there are instances where the parliament acts have been published in braille, such as The Right to Information Act. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[37] requires various building signage to be in braille.
In the United Kingdom, it is required that medicines have the name of the medicine in Braille on the labeling. Australia also recently introduced the tactile feature onto their five-dollar banknote[39]. This tactile feature helps blind and partially sighted people identify the value of the note.
Main article: Unicode braille patterns. Braille was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0. Most braille embossers and refreshable braille displays do not use the Unicode code points, but instead reuse the 8-bit code points that are assigned to standard ASCII for braille ASCII. Thus, for simple material, the same bitstream may be interpreted equally as visual letter forms for sighted readers or their exact semantic equivalent in tactile patterns for blind readers. However some codes have quite different tactile versus visual interpretations and most are not even defined in Braille ASCII.Some embossers have proprietary control codes for 8-dot braille or for full graphics mode, where dots may be placed anywhere on the page without leaving any space between braille cells so that continuous lines can be drawn in diagrams, but these are rarely used and are not standard. The Unicode standard encodes 6-dot and 8-dot braille glyphs according to their binary appearance, rather than following their assigned numeric order. Dot 1 corresponds to the least significant bit of the low byte of the Unicode scalar value, and dot 8 to the high bit of that byte. The Unicode block for braille is U+2800... The mapping of patterns to characters etc is language dependent: even for English for example, see American Braille and English Braille.
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF). (end of 6-dot cell patterns). ^ As of Unicode version 13.0. Every year on 4 January, World Braille Day is observed internationally to commemorate the birth of Louis Braille and to recognize his efforts, but the event is not considered a public holiday.
List of international common standards. Tactile alphabets for the blind.
This article outlines the early history of the industry. Music publishing did not begin on a large scale until the mid-15th century, when mechanical techniques for printing music were first developed. The earliest example, a set of liturgical chants, dates from about 1465, shortly after the Gutenberg Bible.Prior to this time, music had to be copied out by hand. This was a very labor-intensive and time-consuming process, so it was first undertaken only by monks and priests seeking to preserve sacred music for the church. The few collections of secular music that are extant were commissioned and owned by wealthy noblemen. Examples include the Squarcialupi Codex of Italian Trecento music and the Chantilly Codex of French Ars subtilior music.
Hand copying persisted long after the invention of printing and music was widely disseminated in manuscript form well into the 18th century, both in personal copying and scribal publication. A page from the Odhecaton.
The father of modern music printing was Ottaviano Petrucci, a printer and publisher who was able to secure a twenty-year monopoly on printed music in Venice during the 16th century. His first collection was entitled Harmonice Musices Odhecaton and contained 96 polyphonic compositions, mostly by Josquin des Prez and Heinrich Isaac. He flourished by focusing on Flemish works, rather than Italian, as they were very popular throughout Europe during the Renaissance. His printing shop used the triple-impression method, in which a sheet of paper was pressed three times. The first impression was the staff lines, the second the words, and the third the notes.
This method produced very clean results, though it was time-consuming and expensive. Around 1520 in England, John Rastell developed a single-impression method for printing music. [1] With his method, the staff lines, words and notes were all part of a single piece of type, making it much easier to produce. However, this method produced messier results, as the staff lines were often inexactly aligned and looked wavy on the page. The single-impression method eventually triumphed over Petrucci's, however, and became the dominant mode of printing until copper-plate engraving took over in the 17th century. This method was adopted and used widely by a Frenchman, Pierre Attaingnant. First page from the "Statute of Anne". In 1575 Elizabeth I granted Thomas Tallis and his pupil William Byrd a 21-year patent monopoly on the printing and publishing of polyphonic music. The core principle of the Convention is its provision that each of the contracting countries shall provide automatic protection for works in all other countries of the union and for unpublished works whose authors are citizens of or residents in those countries. Performance rights are included in these provisions. As of March 2012, 165 countries had become parties to the convention." Contrary to some scholarly accounts, the 1790 Act's protection of "books did encompass musical compositions. [3] The first registration in the U. For a musical composition was made on January 6, 1794 by Raynor Taylor for the original song The Kentucky Volunteer. Façade of 10 Rue Chaptal, first home of SACEM.
In 1777, Pierre de Beaumarchais founded the "Bureau de Legislation Dramatique" which became the present Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques (SACD) in 1829. A lawsuit won by Bourget and others in 1851 led to the formation of the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique (SACEM) the first performing rights society in the world. Other countries followed suit: The Italian Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori (SIAE) was founded in 1882 and the Spanish "Sociedad de Autores", predecessor of the current Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), in 1899. The predecessor to the Gesellschaft für Musikalische Aufführungs und Mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte (GEMA) was formed in Germany by composer Richard Strauss in 1903. It became GEMA in 1915 when it merged with another small society. So, by the end of the 19th century, the foundation had been laid for the modern music publishing industry. Early modern era: 18th century. The first German music publishing enterprises date from the 18th century. Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf of Leipzig, a printer and general publisher, decided to specialize in music printing as of 1754. He became successful by developing improvements in the setting of music type. Gottfried Christoph Härtel joined the firm in 1795, which soon became the partnership of Breitkopf & Härtel. They were the original publishers for a who's-who of great German composers, including Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Wagner.Schott Music of Mainz was founded in 1770 by Bernhard Schott and still exists today. They specialized in French and Italian operas and, more recently, have published works by Hindemith, Stravinsky, Orff, Schoenberg and Henze. Simrock of Bonn, and later Berlin, was established in 1790 by Nikolaus Simrock. Their original publications included works by Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Weber, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms.
In 1764, Josiah Flagg compiled the first collection of popular and religious music, printed on paper made in the colonies. The post-revolutionary period was notable for the arrival of the first professional music publishers from Europe in the 1770s. They opened shops in Philadelphia, New York, Boston and Baltimore, bringing with them European technology.Benjamin Carr and James Hewitt were two important early American music publishers. In the first quarter of the 19th century alone, 10,000 pieces of popular music were printed by U.
The industry, however, did nothing to promote music or develop writers. Songs became popular by word-of-mouth.
Most minstrel troupes and professional singers wrote their own music or had songs written to order. This changed only gradually as young men involved in other business enterprises began to perceive the possibilities for enrichment in song publishing. Sheet music for "After the Ball".Prior to the 1880s, popular music publishing was a secondary function of music stores or "serious" (Classical) music publishers. After 1880, publishers in New York developed a promotional technique called plugging. By 1900, most music publishers had clustered their businesses along 28th St. And Broadway in order to be closer to New York's thriving entertainment center. This area came to be known as Tin Pan Alley.
The first decade of the 20th century saw the production of more popular music than had ever been written up to that time: about 25,000 songs annually. Despite the enactment of new U.To correct this situation, operetta composer Victor Herbert established the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), in 1914. It quickly attracted prominent composers such as Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa, and was able to ensure that everyone was properly paid and credited for their work. There are many aspects to music publishing. Chief among them is the licensing of music for use in advertising, television, films and other purposes.
Music publishing started out by just being the publishing of the actual sheet music, and not even the score. Song sheets were made which just had the lyrics of a popular song.
In the 19th century, sheet music for songs began including a simple piano accompaniment and notation for the song's melody. In the 2010s, music publishing is the exploitation of compositions (songs, instrumental pieces, and other music) for various performance uses, including newer uses such as licensing for video games, for use by recording artists looking for their next hit single and for use in a range of licensing purposes. Within music publishing there are many different types of licenses.
Synchronization License or Sync Rights. The blanket license paid to the PRO covers every work that is in the PRO's catalog.A mechanical license is issued when a recording artist wishes to sell their recording of a written composition. It serves as a notice to the composition owners that sales are forthcoming and that royalties dictated by a statutory rate will be owed and paid to them. A Performing Rights License (PRO) is the license that gives the licensee the right to publicly perform the song/work.
Lastly, a sync license grants the right to use the composition in the synchronization of a recording over a moving picture in a film, advertisement, television show or any other audiovisual work. For the same synchronization use, one must also obtain a master use license, which grants rights to use the sound recording, which is a separately owned asset from the composition. In the 2010s, publishing companies are a main source of revenue besides live touring, because sync licensing has persisted as a substantial income source while the music industry underwent changes that saw their previously dominant income source, record sales, steadily decline. Initially, popular music was slow to take advantage of the new technology.
One factor in this may have been the expense, which would have concentrated sales among the more upscale purchasers. Until 1925, sheet music sales continued to surpass discs and were the primary source of revenue for publishers and composers.
At that point, sheet music sales began to decline while records were still providing inadequate income to compensate. This led to short lived but serious economic problems for some publishers. Samuel Fox (18841971) who founded the Sam Fox Publishing Company in 1906, was the first to publish original film scores. For example, in 1929, Warner Brothers paid 10 million dollars for Harms, Witmark and Remick; MGM bought Leo Feist Inc. And some smaller companies; Paramount started its own publishing division, Famous Music. List of women music publishers before 1900. The item "X RARE Book 1879 Musical Characters For Blind Braille music Only 2 known" is in sale since Friday, February 26, 2021.This item is in the category "Books & Magazines\Antiquarian & Collectible". The seller is "dalebooks" and is located in Rochester, New York. This item can be shipped worldwide.