As someone who doesn't have any vision problems, I wrote in braille for the first time to make my Character Visiting Cards--and here's how I did it. (Am I off base in using this for two tasks?)

I got a book called Braille for the Sighted to go over the basics. And although there are many ways you can produce text in braille, I opted for the basic slate and stylus. Slates come in many sizes, but I got one that is just right for business cards or pocket notes. I already had some blank business cards, so I used those.

The slate is hinged; I opened it, placed the blank card inside and closed the slate. The stylus is used to "punch" the dots in each braille character into the paper.

Writing braille with a slate and stylus means that you have to write backwards, from right to left. This is probably easier when you actually know braille, but since I'm just learning it, I was slow as I made sure I was punching the dots opposite what was shown in my book.



It's very clear from the text how to do each character. Still, when I finished my first card, I realized that my N was backwards. Whoops!



So I repeated the steps and got all the characters facing the correct way (I think):



I wanted my card to read:

la flaneuse
sf0.org

My character name was relatively easy to figure out, but I wasn't sure how to write a url in braille. My book didn't cover that. I'm still not positive if I did it correctly, but after looking through online braille courses, I tried it. I will have to find someone to check if I'm correct or if not, what to do instead.

For the url, I punched the first two letters. Then, since braille uses a character before a number, I did that, followed by the zero. Next, before the period, I used the character that precedes a punctuation mark. From what I could tell from the online course, I also needed to use a character before the remaining letters in the url to separate them from the number and punctuation. Anyone out there know braille? If so, does this seem right?

Voila! My first braille attempt.



It seems pretty interesting to learn, even for someone who doesn't need it. There's much more to it than just this, but hey, this is a start.