I read books, but can't stand audio books.

A radio/audio play is a different thing.

I set up several hundred public domain books with TTS on an android tablet for my friend that's going blind. He appreciated it, but it doesn't replace reading.

Also even Google and Amazon's best AI TTS isn't even close to a human narrator for fiction. Non mainstream names and places fail. SF&F etc is even worse.

I don't know if he's going to learn braille.

We have thousands of touch sensors.

I work with UK university age students. Sadly most of our visually impaired students are never taught Braille even with progressive impairments or very slow visual-reading speeds/capacities. Many get no O&M either.

Your NFB article sounded so familiar. A VI child constantly babied by a full-time adult rather than taught skills.

We get many low-vision students who get a nasty shock at university as the disability support and university simply won't fund full-time adult assistance.

Heck, braille might be a useful thing for a lot of fully-sighted people to know. I'm thinking of all the times I've reached around the back of a piece of hi-fi or computing equipment, trying to find the right socket while using my memory of the layout (but reversed) as a guide, or maybe looking through a small mirror. If the sockets were all labeled in braille, on the other hand...

Caveat: It might or might not be practical (can braille characters still be legible when they're as small as most electronic socket-labels?), but I have to wonder. ...and I can't think there aren't other cases where it would be even more obviously a plus.

TLDR: it's kind of silly (at best) to withhold a tool from someone for fear that it will make them less functional.

There is a similar, but sort of opposite, problem with support for deaf people. There, many people assume that written text is enough and think it’s okay to ignore the signed modality. But written text is always in another language than the deaf person’s first language.

If only people could ask someone who knows something about the subject instead of just guessing.

from this follows: y’all, make your fscking websites work with lynx.

(Sighted people will also benefit from it; lynx is so much easier on me than any GUI browser can ever be.)

I'm not blind - but my father is. He never learned braille and would say disparaging things about "not needing it" - but I wonder how much of that was from shame or stigma a lot. He's not one to talk about any of it, either. I remember trying to ask him many years ago as a child - before we had the internet - and he was very against even considering learning it.

I think I would have liked to have learned it with him. I think language is cool and interesting. I'm sad he never felt like it was something worth of his time but it wasn't a boundary I wanted to press, either.

@mort Yeah, I had one of those with something bought recently.

The warranty pamphlet *did* have a QR code which it said would take you to the instruction manual ... but actually it took you to a 404.

As tempting as it might seem, do not try something at home.

How's this for a headline?

Superglue and self-extraction: Britain’s desperate ‘DIY dentistry’ is a painful reality | Francisco Garcia | The Guardian
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Superglue and self-extraction: Britain’s desperate ‘DIY dentistry’ is a painful reality

People waiting for basic, often urgent, care are trying medieval-sounding alternatives, says writer Francisco Garcia

^{Francisco Garcia (The Guardian)}