The Humble Slate & Stylus: The first, most reliable, and most confusing way to produce braille.

If you want to purchase a Slate and Stylus, you can get a cheap one on Amazon to practice with this link.

https://amzn.to/2WcZbv5

Tracing its roots back to Charles Barbier and night writing, the slate and stylus was the only way to produce braille prior to 1893.

The slate is composed of two aluminum sheets with a hinge on one side. The paper is sandwiched between each side. One side of the slate is perforated by as many braille cells will fit. In the example shown, the number of cells for a three by five notecard is six by nineteen. This means with this slate, it is possible to emboss 114 characters on a notecard.

The stylus is like a little nail with a handle. The point of the stylus is the exact dimension of a braille dot, and when pushed into the paper in the slate, creates the dot. The perforated side of the slate allows the stylus to push through, and the closed side of the slate stops the stylus at the right depth, so it does not push through and rip the paper.

The tricky thing about the stylus is that you are embossing from the back of the piece of paper, so instead of writing left to right, you must emboss right to left. This requires completing, what a mathematician would call a transformation, in your head. Even though you are technically writing upside and backwards, once you get the hang of it, it does not feel nearly so difficult.

The handle of the stylus has a flat bottom that can be used to erase, or more properly, flatten braille dots.

So, is it slow? Yes. Is there a learning curve? Yes. But, will it break? Probably not. Can it run out of battery? No. Is it affordable? Yes. So, do I like it? No, I love it.

And the other thing is, its pretty flexible in terms of use. You pretty much braille on anything you can sandwich into the slate.

Thanks for watching!