brad.
this is contracted braille, its different from expanded braille where whole words are written.
though i don't know what's the difference between grade 1 and grade 2 braille since i'm not sure in what context are they sorted, but english braille is same everywhere, whether contracted or expanded.
here in india, most of the blind people who use braille as a medium of reading and writing, use a braille slate to write.
it is made of 2 plastic rectangular slabs, one at the bottom has a series of continued six whole cells engraved downwards, and the top side has a grid like fformation which fits into the areas between cells, both vertically and horizontally, and it also has slight tiny bulges in vertical portions of the grid cell so that its easier to form a grip and then write using a braille paper (slightly thicker then normal paper).
the paper is fitted between the 2 slabs, having locks at the border of the slate to help paper not running out.
the matter is then written using a stylus with pointed end and a cap which comfortably rests between fingers.
when the page is full, its expelled out and a new page is continued, and so on.
nowadays, some blind people have started using braillers instead of the slate, because one of the disadvantages of the slate being that the paper has to be turned upside down in order to read anything, while using the brailler machine a person can read whatever he has written exactly on the top side and as soon as a word is written, which makes their lives more easier.
there is also another advantage, speed, because in standard braille slate here letter by letter has to be written seperately with each individual dot pressed manually, and the brailer machine prints the whole letter at once saving a lot of time.
heh, its a very long story, i'm using braille since right when i started going to preparatory school, it was a blind school only though.
i used braille in almost every work till around 2006, after that i bought a brailler, just hoping that it would make it easier to work in higher classes, but a few months later, a big change was struck.
the PC's became cheap drastically here, causing me to go ahead and buy it because of the encouragement from a lot of other sources as well,
and after that the braille has almost vanished from my life..
all the course books, assignments, notes, even online exams, everything, is now digitalized, i mean computerized.
and with regional languages screen readers like safa, (for reading indian languages like hindi, punjabi, gujarati, etc., its even easier to write a hindi doccument work on computer rather then braille.
even a few years ago, braille books were the only thing that i had to rely throughout the year for studying and exams, but now the letter "E" has taken place of those books.
every subject, everything, available on pdf with jaws support probably.
hec, that's not even enough of it, the assignments and notes that i had to make in braille after borrowing someone's notebook, they are all done on PC and stored and saved and
god knows what else.
i'm familiarized with english braille here so well that, after a few years of discontinuation, i've not forgotten a single bit about it, in fact, all of my thoughts of mind which are conveyed by words, has taken a shape of braille itself.
for example, if you hear the word "dog", the reactions given by the mind may be different, but in my case, the braille written word "dog" comes first and then comes the picture of an animal with stripped hairs and things.
it almost became a part of what you call a subcontious mind, you know.
however, that's not enough, even some of the blind persons have adapted to laptop, and that pocket PC's as well!
no one could have ever imagined that a system developed by louis braille in nineteenth century will loose importance with the arival of 21th century... lol.
more importantly, the invention of screen readers and assistive technology, (credits to jaws), has changed the world of the visually impaired community by a million of kilometres.
well i think its enough, and sorry if my above post proves to be senseless or uncoordinated
regards
sid.
He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order.