Blind Smiles

January 19, 2011 8:52 PM

Are there braille emoticons?

For some reason, the question came up amongst my friends of whether there are braille emoticons or not. I cannot find any Google hits concerning the subject, so I figured I'd turn to you guys!

Do blind people even know what a smile looks like? They could feel someone's face, but does that really convey the shape? (I would think so.)

How would you write an emoticon in braille? (Especially :) and :( .) Would you just write the appropriate braille characters?

Thanks!

posted by 47triple2 to grab bag (5 answers total)

Aren't emoticons simply visual depictions of the words such as "smile" or "frown"? So, if there is not a character for it, couldn't the writer simply put the actual word in parenthesis?
posted by AugustWest at 8:59 PM on January 19, 2011

Braille has a way of showing things in what we call "computer code"; the reader would see a colon and a parenthesis next to each other, as we see visually. Presumably, sighted people have already told the braille reader why those two symbols are considered a smiley face.
posted by Melismata at 9:10 PM on January 19, 2011

Blind people know what their own smile feels like.
posted by judith at 10:16 PM on January 19, 2011 [3 favorites]

I can't comment on Braille, but one of the blind people on a listserv I'm on uses (smile) the way others would use a smiley. In my anecdotal experience, the others don't use emoticons or approximations thereof, and I have witnessed a conversation in which one blind person was explaining the shapes of various punctuation marks to other blind people.
posted by Soliloquy at 10:18 PM on January 19, 2011

Hi all,

I know two blind people - who we use for website testing. both of them are "web people" involved with web technology and training others in assistive technology.

Whenever I am emailing either of these people, I have always tried to replace emoticons with something like [grin] etc. I assumed that these characters would be meaningless to them.

However, it is an interesting question, so I asked both of them - and these are their responses:

David:

As far as I know, no screen reader reads those nasty things. I always use (as you suggest) words inbetween () or [] to do the same thing.

Andrew:

The short answer is usually not. I checked your email with all three Windows screen readers and, with the appropriate level of punctuation, they all read the :) and :( characters only.

I tried adding an entry to the Window-Eyes exception dictionary, to no avail. Checking the manual confirmed my suspicion that punctuation is not allowed in the string to be replaced.

The exception is VoiceOver, at least in its iPhone implementation. I have received SMSs where the smiley emoticon has been used and it says, "smiley". I forwarded your email to my home email and opened it in the iPhone. Both emoticons were spoken correctly. There isn't a user-definable exceptions dictionary in the iPhone, so Apple must have set it up. If I read a character at a time, it reads the colon and open or close parenthesis, which is that I would expect.

When sending to blindies, then, looks like you'll have to limit your emoticons to those using iPhones. Of course, it's useful for blindies to know about these things and what they mean. But what happens if I forget the combination :(?

Hope this helps!
posted by greenhornet at 5:11 PM on January 20, 2011 [1 favorite]