I use braille in braille screen input. I sometimes wish I would have a  braille display but I wouldn't use it enough to worth the price.

I too use braille... quite a lot actually. At work I use my braille note touch plus as an always-on notepad and for meeting notes where I don't want to carry a laptop. Braille is far better than speech for doing things like debugging code, and I also enjoy reading braille books and being able to listen to music at the same time... Speech can't offer you that.

Wow, I didn't think the post will be lively. thank you everyone for your response, it helped me give much broader perspective about braille. I think most people here agree about math are much easier with braille, yes? Now I have an other question. At school, I didn't  study math much, not because I didn't want to, well actually I am a bit lazy to study math but mostly because the blind school curiculum here is different with normal school (btw is it the same with you guys? Do school for the blind in your country have different curiculum with normal ones?) so I only study the basic math here like algebra, arithmetic, geometry, etc. I don't think I have calculus and more complex stuff at school. For those who take math as their majour, or have been dealing with math regularly, can you guys imagine dealing with math without braille in the future? What is the biggest barrior that prevents you to work with  math without braille?

The curriculum is definitely different here in the blind schools, and I dare say that they are very much behind the sighted schools when it comes to math and science.

As for braille for math? I'll see when I get on to calculous, (I am learning math from khanacademy since the schools here did such a shitty job, and left so many holes in my foundation.)

For basic math though? I don't have reading it with screen reader, though reading on the browser, with rendered math text is annoying, since it takes a while for the speech to speak it, and it also tends to slow down the loading of the page.

I prefer much simpler things, rather than rendered math.

To be honest though, I don't see myself using braille for math in the future either. (Who knows? Maybe I'll eat my words when the time comes.)

Sorry for double posting, but I am curious about something. On highschool, I read braille music partiture, and it makes me think. Is there a way for us to read music partiture with screen reader through a software? Or is there someone who work on it now to make it possible?

@Redvelvitchoclete,
What Braille Display do you have? Also, how flexible are your hands? With this information, we may be able to help you more efficiently.

I haven't read braille on paper in about 8 to 9 years now. Starting from grade 7 in school, we got our own laptop and braille display that we used till we were finished with school. I use a braille display here and there, but my main method of consuming is listening to my screen Reader. For me, a braille display comes in handy if you have to look at source code or do mathematical operations, I personally have a better picture of what I am doing if i have a braille display in front of me.
But mostly, I use the Screen Reader, braille displays are to bulky to cary around and for most modern machines, you would need to place them on a higher surface to aline them with the braille display. If not, at least my hand has to be bend quite a lot which gets really uncomfortable when working with it for a long time, especially with my MacBook Air, and the pro later on.

I sometimes write a few sentences in braille so to not lose the basics, but I haven't needed that in years by now. I don't use Braile screen input on my iPhone because I am three times as fast with direct touch typing, not the normal touch typing mode, but the direct input one so where you just tap the letter and not hold it and lift your finger.

I still remember some parts of German braille grade 2, but ddefinitly not every part of it. I couldn't use it correctly anymore because just like normal grade 1 braille, I haven't used it and I don't see me using it in the future, I don't know why i would use it anyway.

Greetings Moritz.

@39, does spell every letter with screen reader feel more troublesome for you when looking at a code? I don't have any experience at coding so I want to know

Braille displays are very, very expensive, at least over here, and I have been wondering how so many people on here seem to have them. Are they affordable in your countries? Or do you get them through some organisation? The disability unit at my university has a few, but we obviously can only borrow them for a bit and not keep them. I don't really have experience with using them so not sure how useful it would be.
I went to a blind school where we did everything in braille, but after that I haven't used it much except for maths. I struggle doing complicated maths without braille, it's hard for me to visualise equations by just hearing them being read out by a screen reader. And LaTeX equations can have such a convoluted syntax that it can be difficult to follow. I do type using braille screen input on my phone though, it's so much faster and better than touch typing which I never could do very efficiently. With braille screen input I can type at the same rate or maybe even faster than on a keyboard.

I learned to read braille with both hands. So, is there a way to teach myself to read with one hand? Also, when you use your braille display with your phone, does it eat your phone battery?

I use Braille a lot when I am working. I always had my lesson plans in Braille so I could read them, instead of trying to listen to my computer and my students at the same time. Even when the Braille display the people gave me back in the United states was broken, I always tried to rewrite my plans i made on the computer in to my Braille notebook. It was also much quieter when entering people's test answers. Math is also much easier when you can see the layout in 2 dimensions on a piece of paper, and so are many forms of poetry. I would probably read poetry a lot more if I could see it on a normal page like a sighted person. Most Braille displays only have 1 line, so they don't really help with math or poetry in this aspect. I also much prefer to write new languages, or read books without audio versions that have a lot of foreign words in them in Braille, because the computer pronounces the words so badly, especially in made up languages, or the really small obscure languages I studied for my linguistics degree. This is especially important for languages with really long words and diacritics like Guaraní. This isn't even getting in to trying to read phonetic symbols with all their diacritics on the computer. That's so obnoctious. Also when studying religious materials, I like to slowly read and think about them while listening to silence or calm music, and loud synthetic speech really gets in the way of having a quiet meditative setting. I guess I really like the ability to use Braille. It works when all electronic devices die, which has happened to me on multiple occasions during work or class, and I can even draw pictures with it!

I'm kind of an odd one I suppose. Tl,dr: I believe every blind child should be fluent in braille literacy. That said, I believe it is important for blind youth, especially when nearing adulthood, to develop their own perspective, without pressure, on how much they feel they need braille in their day-to-day lives. At the end of the day, braille is a blind person's tool. There's no getting around it. It's a damn useful tool, and accomplishes many of the same things print does for the sighted, but the differences between braille and print are far from negligible in my opinion, simply because there's no way to make the two systems compatible with one another without a third party. Sometimes that third party is a transcriber, but for the most part, technology is serving that third party role extraordinarily well these days.

You could argue that braille is not really necessary with the technology we have. To be honest, sighted people are struggling with the same problems; I have heard that children no longer learn cursive writing or how to read a clock face. Why? Because analog clocks are antiquated, and nobody uses cursive anymore. Aside from those things being old school, I think technology is just providing easier alternatives. Some people find that incredibly sad, some people aren't bothered by it. I'm in the middle somewhere, able to understand both sides. I'm not here to find happy compromises for all the world's problems, so I'll take a back seat and let other people sort out what is or is not needed in 2020.

My own personal story:
I learned braille really well in school, but I haven't used braille much in almost 8 years. I can still read and write it well though.

The reason I ultimately stopped using braille regularly was that I was tired of dealing with it. I've never liked the fact that I am blind, and braille was just one more thing I felt made me different.

What really clenched it for me was an incident a month or so into my seventh grade year. My English teacher asked me if I could write capital letters, because I forgot to capitalize words on a spelling test. She wasn't being rude or anything, she legit was concerned that my device wasn't advanced enough to do it. Some people might have been appalled; this would be an insult on their intelligence. I don't appall easily though. I knew it was an honest question, and it made me sad. It made me feel like I came from a primitive culture with poor educational standards. I don't hold it against her for asking at all... It just sent me on a thought train which added to my dissatisfaction with my blindness.

Then there was the incident where a teacher accidentally gave my braille transcriber a test with the answer key, which resulted in me having to take the test late in order for the situation to be sorted out. Not to mention the multiple incidents where my hard copy braille was not very readable due to me erasing stuff, so I'd have to tell the transcriber what I wrote. It frustrated me, since I never felt directly responsible for my work. I always had to go through someone to translate my blind output to sighted input.

When I started getting good at computers, I went through a phase where I was good at certain things on the computer, and other things on the note taker. Anything involving the Internet was a computer task, while anything involving writing was a note taker task. I had to go through braille to text translation which wasn't always perfect. More than once I'd go back and forth between note taker and computer, and I found it irritating. I just wanted to feel like I was fitting in with my peers. Maybe I was just looking for an escape from blindness.

As it turns out, I sort of got my wish soon after high school. During my first few months of college, my note taker crashed on me very unexpectedly. It would take weeks to fix. I did have a nice laptop at the time, though I didn't use it much. But now I had little choice but to make it work.

Funny thing, the laptop actually worked out as well as I could've hoped. I kept using it even when the note taker came back, which was a good thing because it crashed again in a few months. The laptop wasn't void of problems, but when I did have issues with it, I had many options to get it fixed. I never went a day without it... at worst, I had to call someone from the IT department to come in and get it booted up for me, which he was able to do in less than 2 hours. Another time they helped me over the phone to get reconnected to the wifi, and guided me through a procedure with ipconfig. Within 10 minutes I was on. It was, in a word, awesome. It was such a liberating feeling to do things the way any other sighted person with a laptop would.

I felt that people around me were happy to know I could use the stuff they could use. Professors were put at ease when they saw I was able to use Blackboard, send e-mails etc. just like any other student who had a laptop. I did take tests at a special testing center which could provide extra accommodations. AT first this bothered me, but I soon learned that many of my sighted friends went there. I don't know exactly why they did, but they certainly were not blind, and didn't have some severe learning disability, so if they could go, I could too. In the end, I felt like my blindness could afford to sit in the second row instead of being at center stage demanding attention.

With that said, I do still use braille. I use it all the time on my phone, since it's faster than touch typing on the onscreen keyboard. I know I should be reading braille more too, since my spelling and to some extent, punctuation use, was drastically better when I used braille. I can remember most if not all the words I read in braille, but if I try to learn a new word without braille, it just doesn't stick very well. The sound of the word does, the meaning often does particularly if I find a simple definition I understand, but the spelling just doesn't sink in as easily.

I am fully convinced that the tactile and visual parts of the brain just have more of an aptitude for remembering things like how words look, or in our case, how they feel. Hearing things letter by letter will tell you a lot, but it won't stick in the same way that feeling a word or looking at it visually will. I think it also depends on how our brains are wired; I for instance am only good at learning auditorily if I am trying to memorize musical notes, sounds, or other non-literary objects. As soon as you introduce words, numbers etc. my brain is trying to relate them to something tactile. In my case, when I want to remember how a word is spelled, I either imagine it in braille, imagine my fingers on a computer keyboard, or some bizarre combination of the two. Still, new words and spellings don't stick for me nearly as well as they used to, and I am pretty solidly convinced this is because I am no longer reading braille regularly. I shudder to think how bad my spelling would be if I never learned braille... As much as I kinda hated having to use it, it is a letter-by-letter representation of the spoken word, which you don't get by reading audio books, listening to people talk, or using your favorite synthetic voice to read your documents.

Here's an interesting question/challenge. Have you ever done unusual things with braille? My unusual thing was typing braille with one hand. Not on a Perkins brailler, but on a note taker or other braille keyboard where the keys don't travel so much. I used to do it when I wanted to make a digital version of a hard copy paper. One time one of my vision teachers caught me doing this, reading with my right hand while typing with the left, (I read primarily with the right hand btw), and they seemed surprised. It was one of those adolescent things I could have fun with, at any rate, and I found uses for it lol