
Scanning a Braille Playboy Magazine (2011) - brudgers
http://blog.archive.org/2011/08/17/scanning-a-braille-playboy/
======
sagebird
I used to volunteer with an organization in Philadelphia for the blind and
vision impaired. I read Playboy articles to a blind co-worker who entered it
as Braille into a computer program. They had a press as well, to produce
Braille documents and mail them to individuals and libraries. It was an
interesting experience. An older woman would take a black sharpie and scribble
over all the "interesting" photos before giving the Playboy issue to me to
read.

I became interested in Braille Kobographs (
[http://www.dotlessbraille.org/kobographs.htm](http://www.dotlessbraille.org/kobographs.htm)
) and did some experiments with turning it into a font (
[https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/365490/braille_ko...](https://fontstruct.com/fontstructions/show/365490/braille_kobigraphs_standard)
).

------
Jun8
Concept of 2D scanning an essentially 3D artifact tangentially brought to mind
the problem of tens of thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that are waiting to
be deciphered. One good way to do this would be to 3D scan them and share the
scans among academic institutions but for some reason this is not done at
scale, e.g. see this recent post:
[http://persiababylonia.org/2018/07/31/3d-scanning-clay-
table...](http://persiababylonia.org/2018/07/31/3d-scanning-clay-tablets/).
Cost is an issue but my guess it's not the only one.

Building a cheap hand scanner by using a cheap 3D sensor, e.g.
[https://www.adafruit.com/product/3316](https://www.adafruit.com/product/3316)
is perennially on my project todo list. Anybody else finds this interesting?

~~~
gioele
For clay tablets 3D scanning is too imprecise and too expensive (in terms of
labor, equipment and time).

RTI (Reflectance Transformation Imaging) [1,2] is a much better alternative to
these "flattish" artifacts. All you need is a decent camera, a flashlight and
a small piece of freely available software.

The result is an extremely high-res 2.5D scan of the surface of the object.
Here is a (thumbnail-sized) example of an RTI'd Greek wax seal:
[http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/RTIgif_x...](http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/RTIgif_xs.gif) (from [3,4]).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_texture_mapping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_texture_mapping)
[2]
[http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/index.ht...](http://culturalheritageimaging.org/Technologies/RTI/index.html)
[3] [http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/2019/04/26/rti-dome-am-cceh-
erster-...](http://cceh.uni-koeln.de/2019/04/26/rti-dome-am-cceh-erster-
testlauf-erfolgreich-absolviert/) [4] [http://cceh.uni-
koeln.de/RTIBlogpostFiles/web-image/](http://cceh.uni-
koeln.de/RTIBlogpostFiles/web-image/)

~~~
kitd
That's ingenious. One of the "obvious when you think about it" solutions.

------
zantana
This immediately makes me think of the movie Sneakers
[https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/9c0aya/in_sne...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MovieDetails/comments/9c0aya/in_sneakers_the_blind_character_whistler_can_be/)

------
benj111
From the top comment:

"And before someone asks, no they don’t have tactile pictures! I called the
local library for the blind around the age boys want to know that sort of
thing and asked. They hung up"

~~~
miki123211
As a blind/braille user myself, I'm curious as to what they replace them with.
Some publishers just omit pictures, while some try to describe them,
particularly when they're significant, not just for decorational purposes
only.

~~~
tempguy9999
Somewhat fatuous question, are the pix in Playboy considered significant given
that that's what the mag is known for?

Actual serious question to miki123211, if it were technically possible to do
so, perhaps by contoured impressions, couldn't pictures be reproduced as to an
extent useful to those who only touch? Could a tree be reproduced to show the
root knot, the trunk growing out of it, and the division into branches? If
close up the outline of leaves and the veins within? Either with smooth curves
or dots much smaller than braille.

Having written that I can appreciate the technical challenges, but in
theory...? And if possible, would it be useful and appreciated by braille
users?

~~~
sagebird
When I was helping to translate Playboy articles into Braille (around 2010) I
only ever translated articles that generally had nothing to do with sex. The
articles are not too much different than you would find in a normal mag. I
don’t think they were trying to translate the porn part. They have limited
resources so they have to make value decisions on where to spend their effort.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230988)

~~~
mwcampbell
From the old comment thread:

> I'm curious if there are any methods they could use to scan and translate
> the typed Braille into written English, or language in which it is written.

Liblouis [1] can translate in both directions.

[1]: [http://liblouis.org/](http://liblouis.org/)

