Due to its complexity, however, Two-Cell Braille remains less widespread than traditional forms of braille among the visually impaired today. In the 1970s, Huang invented Two-Cell Chinese Braille to make up for the lack of tone markings in Current Braille, which contained a number of confusing homophones, adding an additional braille mark on each syllable to represent tones. To standardize these regional forms, the Ministry of Education (MOE) began to promote Current Braille or “New Braille” in 1953, a system invented by Huang Nai, then-chairman of the China Association for the Blind and Deaf, that combined Louis Braille’s system with pinyin. Since Kangxi Braille was based on the Beijing dialect, and the numbering system was difficult to memorize, various forms of regional braille developed in the 20th century based on pinyin. The institute owned a braille Bible, which inspired Murray and Chinese teachers to combine Braille’s system and the Kangxi Dictionary into Kangxi Braille, also known as the 408 System or the Murray Numeral System, using numbers from 1 to 408 to represent 408 frequently-used Chinese characters. Zhang recalls an entire WeChat group where people with visual impairments shared their experiences of awkward braille signs, one member finding braille on a handrail in a subway station giving no warning about a stairway or indication of its direction-rather, it just said “handrail.”Ĭhina adopted its first tactile writing system, based on Louis Braille’s code of six dots representing 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, in the 1870s, after the British missionary William Hill Murray established the Hill Murray Institute for the Blind (later renamed the Beijing School for the Blind). On social media platform Zhihu, a blogger noted the braille elevator buttons in their apartment complex had the “Up” and “Down” symbols switched around. However, two years later, journalists found many were poorly maintained, with tactile arrows indicating the direction of the bus worn off. According to the Beijing Radio and TV station, the city’s Xicheng district added braille to 16 bus stop signs in 2015, serving around 6,000 people with visual impairments in the district. Though China has national regulations requiring braille signage and voice broadcasts to be available in public areas like bus stops, implementation has been a mixed bag. Yet the infrastructure meant to improve their mobility and access to public facilities, such as tactile writing (braille) and tactile pavements, can actually hinder rather than help the vulnerable due to poor implementation and designs that ignore their needs. Physical barriers, employment discrimination, and lack of education opportunities are struggles already familiar for the estimated 17 million people in China living with visual impairments. “They probably thought, ‘just having braille is enough, it doesn’t matter what it says.’” A graduate student studying English translation in Beijing, Zhang prefers using audio navigation apps on his mobile phone to get around, rather than the limited number of public braille signs that are both hard to find and unhelpful to use. “I think the relevant officials just did it for show,” Zhang, now 26, says. Having lost his sight at the age of 2 after botched operations for progressive glaucoma, Zhang Weijun remembers the curiosity he felt the first time he encountered braille on a bus stop in his hometown of Wuhan at age 11, the same year the city first installed it in public areas.īut the boy’s excitement quickly turned to disappointment when he traced the raised bumps on the sign, only to find several meaningless numbers, without any additional information such as the stop name and direction the bus was heading.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |