I Never Really Knew What a Number Sign Looked Like in Print

My daughter got a new braille machine today as a present from Mimi and Gramps.   They wanted to get her something she would enjoy and be able to use for school.   This new brailler is high technology in comparison to the other braille machines on the market.   Even though the process is simple, just imprinting up to six dots at a time, the machines themselves need to be rugged while at the same time accurate.   That, and they’re not inexpensive.

When the brailler arrived today we opened it up and plugged it in.   Other braille machines are like old-style manual typewriters with keys you have to bang.    You still do that with this machine, but that’s because you have to hit hard enough to imprint the dots on a page of card stock braille paper.   But there’s a digital display, it speaks to you and it has a memory.

My daughter started typing on it right away and it called back to her every character she typed.    If she was spelling out a word it said the letters and then pronounced the word when the space key was pressed.   It also knew about contracted braille.

Contracted braille is like our contractions.   We can write “can not” as “can’t” and braille has similar shortcuts, but it’s a little more like shorthand.   For instance the letter ‘y’ all alone means ‘you’ and the letter ‘l’ represents the word ‘like’.   When my daughter typed a contracted word it pronounced the word and not just the shorthand letter(s).

As my daughter typed she made some mistakes.  She discovered some new contractions she hadn’t learned yet from making mistakes—and that was exciting to her.   What was exciting to me was the screen that showed each letter at about an inch in size.   She could look at the screen and see the uppercase or lowercase letter.   She could also see symbols.

She was typing a number and did the indicator symbol, “indicating” the next letters were actually numbers instead.   What appeared on the screen was the pound sign, or hashtag as it’s more commonly called today.   She looked at the symbol and said, “I never really knew what a number sign looked like in print.”  

The new brailler also has memory.   She can scroll backwards through what she’s typed and we can store a writing session on a USB drive and then bring it to the computer to save it or print it out so we non-braille readers can see what she wrote.

We’re all very excited to see what she does and learns with her new brailler.    Thanks, Mimi and Gramps.   Her brailler is something she’ll use for years to come.   It’s her main method of writing and is very important to her.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son knows I like things salty.   He told me after dinner the other night, “just so you know, there is such a thing as too salty”.   I told him I hadn’t met a dinner that met that criteria yet.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Our neighbor, Blake, came over to watch my daughter for an hour tonight while I ran an errand.   She had a great time with him and hugged him when he left.   As he was shutting the door she called out, “I can’t wait for next time, you’re my best friend forever, Blake.”