There are apparently only 50 to 70 people learning to read Braille in Quebec currently, according to the respective assessments of the Service québécois du livre adapted and the Institut Nazareth et Louis-Braille (INLB). ). A certain decline. “But it’s tendentious to say that,” recalls Janie Lachapelle, of the INLB. “Even 40 years ago, with a visual impairment, even if you were never going to develop blindness, you went to specialized school to learn Braille. Now, we have plenty of other technological means for reading and writing. »
A look at braille today
“Take my boss: she learned Braille when she was little,” says Janie Lachapelle. She never used it. She has very good low vision. It works in character magnification with its software. »
Janie lost her sight when she was in second grade. “At the age of eight… Wait… That’s 37 years old. It’s the best age: you’re in the middle of learning and you’ve already had time to learn to read letters. »
Today, when she thinks of spelling a word, she imagines it in letters or Braille. “I’m quite unique for that,” she says.
Janie Lachapelle, specialist in clinical activities, works to transform books, albums, textbooks, exams and electricity bills into Braille or an adapted digital document. With her service, she produces approximately 90 documents per year.
On the table in front of her, children’s albums, in color. One of the Émile series, next to Snot in the nose, from Orbie. On each page a transparent film set with small dots was glued, to add the braille version.
“We call them media duos. I have two sighted children. It was the fun when they were little. I read the stories to them, they looked at the pictures, and also the printed matter, to learn to read. Because for that, they have to see the letters. »
Countries and bones in braille
Are the images in Braille, too? “Yes, but it’s more summary,” replies Mme Lachapelle. However, she brings out a geopolitical atlas, magnificent with its little white-on-white border dots. The paper is soft under the fingers, very thick.
Next to it, an anatomy book: hand, phalanges, phalanges and phalanges can be seen from the tips of the eyes as well as from the tips of the fingers. Some visual information, like this, cannot be transformed into text for text-to-speech. Like the tables and bar or line graphs of exercises in a mathematics textbook.
Among the production, a novel by Dominique Demers, bound in a white binder. Further on, copies of a book by Éric Chacour and the biography of Clémence. The books are huge. “Roughly speaking, two and a half to three times bigger. »
Janie Lachapelle is a big reader: on vacation, it’s impossible to bring four or five of these very thick books. “Paper braille tends to diminish because the advent of technology allows us to read truly dedicated braille formats, like the one you see here,” she says, pointing to her computer screen.
Its keyboard has an additional row, a Braille display, at the very bottom, where eight-dot keys are aligned – each character in paper Braille has three lines of two dots, but the digital version of the writing system adds a fourth to convey more information (to indicate an uppercase letter, for example).
The line is activated mechanically, and allows her to read through her fingers what the journalist reads on the computer screen. “Louis Braille did not know it, but his system [créé vers 1825]it’s like binary,” it’s very easily compatible with coding, she notes.
The braille of the fakir
To learn to read Braille, “we can start with bigger dots,” she says, smiling at the amazement of the journalist with numb fingers, who feel no difference between the has and the z. “When I was very little, I started by positioning small nails in a board with six holes. Because you have to both recognize the combination of points and know how it is constructed, a e. »
“The biggest challenge is discriminating letters tactilely. Afterwards, to become a functional reader, you have to gain a certain speed. » Always lower in braille.
“A very good Braille reader can read between 150 and 200 words per minute,” says M.me Lachapelle. It was long believed that an adult print reader read up to 350 words per minute; the reality would rather oscillate between 240 and 260 words.
Today, explains Janie Lachapelle, “the watchword for children is to introduce voice synthesis as late as possible. So that they learn to write. To write “boat” and know that you have to write “water”, you must have read it. If they don’t use braille, they will write by sound. » Conversely, if someone loses their sight at a fairly old age, it may be judged that the efforts to learn Braille will be too heavy.
“The ideal is a cocktail of different tools to help with reading,” says Janie. Be able to switch from speech synthesis to braille; read more or less quickly depending on genre and needs; and, for those who still have visual residue, play with character magnification.
“When we prepare a document, if I want it to be reusable, we have to think about everyone. Our blind people, suffering from blindness. Our low visions — our font is flat, it’s Arial…”
“We think about our alignment, our paragraphs, our lines, our margins: everything is spaced out, so that there is air, but not too much, because if you get bigger, everything gets bigger: you need a happy medium. »
“We are using black letters on a white background. It’s very conservative, but many people who have low vision want reverse polarity: white letters on a black background, to avoid glare,” explains the coordinator.
And the file includes a Braille document, ready for embossing. At the back of the Longueuil offices, a brand new embosser. “We ordered two last summer, they just arrived, we unpacked this one 10 minutes ago…” proudly explains Marc-André Rémillard, braille technician and clairvoyant.
Sober, gray, it looks a bit like a machine for teleporting small objects. Around, boxes and boxes of braille paper, only one kind. “It’s a more cardboard-based paper,” we explain to Duty.
Stereotypes of a different kind
“You need a certain density of paper if you want to do double-sided braille. » The sides of this paper are perforated, and its sheets are bonded to each other — like those for old dot-matrix printers. “The traction is so intense for embossing that without it, under the impact, the sheet moves, the lines become crooked, the bottom is more erased or two lines emboss one on the other…”
Janie Lachapelle dreams of the day when all books will also be available in accessible digital format. She will then be able to devour the Black Series novels with her grown-up, as she does now, but all the novels. Technology allows it.
“Before, books were retyped with a punch; afterwards, it was with machines that we called stereotypes [braille]. It was very automated, a machine where you copied with your feet and hands. »
“It was blind people who did that,” she continues. And tomorrow, artificial intelligence may be able to transcribe into voice the tables and illustrations that Janie still has to translate today into Braille on paper.