[BRLTTY] Getting my braille driver for the FCHAD working.

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by S. Massy on 2012/10/18 at 16:37 -0400]

>Here's an interesting exercise, however: try
>reading with nothing *but* your index finger. Without my middle finger
>on the display as well, I notice a considerable slow-down, though not as
>significant as when reading with a different finger. My guess is the
>brain must use the signal from the forerunning fingers to perform some
>kind of preprocessing.

And, it also seems, from the trailing finger (middle finger of left hand) for 
error correction.

With just two index fingers, I notice that, at least for me, it works much 
better if both are right next to each other rather than a bit apart.

Tim: 

Your device reminds me a bit of a device I used to use to read print called an 
Optacon. To use it, the index finger of my left hand would rest on an array of 
vibrating pins. I believe the array was 24 high by 6 wide. My right hand would 
move a camera-like thing (known as the lens module), which was at the end of a 
thin cable, over a printed page. The pins would show the image of the lines on 
the page. There was a zoom adjustment which one would adjust so that the array 
would show exactly one character. There was a sensitivity adjustment which 
would set the darkness of the line which would trigger a pin to start 
vibrating, and also a switch to flip between dark-on-light and light-on-dark.

The Optacon does show that, with a bit of getting used to, one can learn to 
move one hand over the material while reading with the other, stationary, hand. 
There's one thing, however, which I believe made a huge difference. This is 
that the image presented on the array was always what was exactly under the 
camera, which means that it moved as the camera moved. I'm suspecting that it'd 
be a lot more difficult if the character simply switched from one to the next.

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