Braille in Sydney

[khiemtran]

As I mentioned in a comment earlier, you can find Braille signs on many of the traffic crossing around the Sydney CBD. You can see here how there is also large, raised print although, unfortunately, the colouring on the letters is starting to disappear.



Reading the Braille itself is quite interesting. Well, to me, anyway...



Here's a close-up of the Braille dots. The first thing you need to know is that all Braille characters are represented by 6 dot cells, with each dot either raised or not.

o o
o o
o o

Now, can you see any patterns?





So, the first thing we can tell is that the letters GE appear twice in the text above the Braille and the number 0 appears twice as well. This matches the pattern of repeated cells in the Braille, which is a good clue that the Braille text is the same as the large text above it.





With this knowledge it's quite easy to fill out possible readings for each character. However there's still something odd...






First of all, there are two extra characters that don't correspond to letters in the top line? Can you guess what they are for?

. o
. o <- mystery cell
o o



Actually, it turns out that it might have been a lot easier to guess if the letters and numbers on the sign had been just a bit different. The mystery characters are actually number indicators. They show that the following characters are to be read as numbers instead of letters (the character for A is also 1, B is 2, and so on, up to J which is 0). If there had just been an A, B, I or J in the text, it would have been a lot more obvious, because there would have been a match with the 1, 2, 9 or 0 in the street numbers.

So, now you know how to tell numbers from letters in Braille. And if you ever need to decode some Braille and you can't remember all the letters, this might just be a vital clue.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

You have a natural gift for cryptography! I wonder how long it would have taken me to figure out what you explained, had you not explained it. The mystery cell is like the button that lets you switch when you're dealing with something like a cell phone or a digital clock or a TV remote. V. cool!

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It does make me wonder if a Braile reader would also have a much stronger association between those letters and numbers. Everyone knows that C is the third letter, but how many know that H is the eighth? And, of course, most people wouldn't make any connection between J and zero. Perhaps you'd read 312 and think "CAB" or 4514 and think "DEAD".

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Everyone knows that C is the third letter, but how many know that H is the eighth?

Computer geeks. And people familiar with cultures antedating separate number symbols, in which letters stood for numbers. (In the Hebrew alphabet, ח (Ḥ), from which the Latin letter H is ultimately derived, has the value 8.)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

That's interesting! I didn't know that about the Hebrew alphabet. Is it ever an issue telling letters from numbers?

I certainly wouldn't have known that H=8 without counting, although (showing my age here) I could have told you that A=65 and Z=90...


ETA: Ah! Just googled through to gematria. Very interesting! I had no idea...

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that about the Hebrew alphabet. Is it ever an issue telling letters from numbers?

No, because numbers are arranged in decreasing order of size (like Roman numerals), and acronyms and numbers have a ׳ or ״ before the last letter (or after the sole letter if there's only one) to mark them as such; for example the current Hebrew year is התשע״ג, indicating 5773 AM.

Sometimes the numbers are rearranged to make acronyms, as aides-memoire.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

YOu are always teaching me such cool stuff. :D

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks! One thing I forgot to mention is how hard it is to even find the Braille to read if you can't see.