A Token Gesture to the Blind
Last week, a friend called to tell me that he had just seen a commercial for the commemorative Louis Braille silver dollar coins. Immediately, I saw it as a literal token gesture. If they really want to help the blind, why don’t they mark currency so we can identify it by touch?
The coins crack me up. They have the standard symbols and sayings as American currency. On one side, it has a portrait of Louis Braille, the inventor of braille, the system that a decreasing amount of blind people use to read by touch. On the other side, the coin has a picture of a boy with a bookcase of braille books behind him.
Now for the life irony: The coin has the letters “brl”, the contraction for braille, embossed in braille on it. Grade II braille has 189 contractions to shorten the amount of characters in this already bulky medium. “brl” stands for braille, any American braille reader would know this. Embossing “brl” on the coin just makes me laugh, sort of like the story I’ve told here before where the hotel had “NO SMOKING!” signs outside of each room. Why not write “Print” in print on it? They should emboss “$1″ that seems much more practical.
If they really want to help the blind deal with money, they should emboss or mark the currency, as they do in Europe. Some currency has actual braille on it, and other currency has special markings. I actually like this solution more than standard braille, because the markings don’t ware down as easily, and it requires less special equipment and overhead, which means less excuses from sighted bureaucrats. If Europe can do it, certainly America can! Stop giving us these token gestures! Do something real!
Obama Nonsense
I saw (or should I say heard) an Obama commercial. It showed a website that would show you how much money you would supposedly save with Obama’s tax plan over McCain’s. Of course, they did not verbally say the URL. Little things like this really get me, and I can’t help but extrapolate a pattern.
It reminds me of my all-time favorite accessibility story. I went to visit a friend and to go to a Reverse Speech convention in San Diego. The convention took place at a hotel in a nearby city, so we journeyed there with his Dad. When we arrived on the floor with our room, my friend noticed brailled signs by each room. “Look at this.” he said excitedly, and put my hand on one. He assumed, as did I, that the sign would say the room number. I read the sign, and it took a moment to fully register. Then, I started cracking up! “What? What does the sign say?” my friend asked. It said: NO SMOKING! I said: “Well, I don’t know where we are, but I know we can’t smoke!” which of course we wanted to do at the earliest opportunity. We went down the hall and sure enough, on every door: NO SMOKING!
To understand the real humor of this, you have to know braille, specifically Grade II Braille. Braille has cells, and each cell has a character. Each character can have a letter, or a special character such as a numbersign or contraction. To capitalize a word, you put a cell with a single dot in the sixth position before the first character. This just capitalizes the first character, suitable for literary works. To make a word completely capitalized, you put two dot sixes before it, using two cells. In other words, for the first word “NO” you first have two cells each with a dot six before it, making the whole word four cells, doubling its length. You get another dot six for the S in Smoking, and the exclamation point at the end takes another cell. You can use the -ing contraction for “Smoking!” making the word seven cells. This wastes four cells in total. A braille reader would write it as “no smoking” using eight characters as opposed to twelve.
Such mindlessness immediately calls to mind the mindlessness of bureaucracy, and why socialism ultimately fails. Don’t buy in to the hype! Obama, when asked about the flat tax, said he’d like to see around forty percent. His Father apparently said a hundred percent. We have a week until the election. May Goddess protect us!