Braille

Braille is a tactile writing system of raised dots. On the web, it's read on a refreshable braille display, a device that renders text from a screen reader as braille under the user's fingertips. Braille literacy and braille display use are different things. Many blind people switch between a braille display and speech output depending on the task.

Two W3C user stories show parts of this. Lakshmi, who is blind, uses a screen reader at work. The barriers she describes (images without alt text, unlabelled form fields, dialogs that trap focus) affect braille displays and speech output equally. Marta, who is deaf and blind, is learning to use a braille display for email and web browsing. It works well only when content is properly coded. One form was unusable because a button wasn't marked up as one.

What works for braille-display users is what works for screen reader users generally: semantic HTML, meaningful alt text, keyboard-reachable controls, and buttons coded as buttons. Braille is particularly sensitive to layout. Complex tables, multi-column content, and visual-only cues for relationships are hard to follow in a linear stream.