{"id":73789,"date":"2024-09-09T12:44:26","date_gmt":"2024-09-09T12:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kulturaktiv.org\/?p=73789"},"modified":"2024-10-16T11:19:58","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T11:19:58","slug":"blindlings-and-seelings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kulturaktiv.org\/en\/blindlings-and-seelings\/","title":{"rendered":"Blindlings and Seelings"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The paper I am allowed to take home is slightly thicker than an ordinary A4 sheet of paper. It is completely white – and yet there is something written on it. Small dots are punched into it from the back and form bumps on the front. This is Braille. This alphabet is used by blind and visually impaired people all over the world, regardless of whether their native language (by sighted people) is written in Latin letters or Chinese characters or in another of the more than 100 writing systems that exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what I take away from Marco Rademann’s Braille workshop, which takes place on this hot afternoon in the Kreativ Raum B\u00f6rse store in Hauptstra\u00dfe, is more than just a sheet of paper with huppels and an information sheet with the entire Braille alphabet. Namely a completely new kind of experience and a knot in my brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It starts with the fact that my untrained fingertips have no feeling at all for the differentiation of the huppels: Like a dice, a letter consists of one to a maximum of six dots. Marco moves both hands effortlessly over the line and reads almost as fast as sighted people. He even managed his law degree and state examination in this way – today he works in a dark restaurant in Kleinzschachwitz and is involved in the Johannstadt district. What he likes about this job is that he doesn’t need any help, which is hardly ever the case in the everyday life of a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even writing your own text in Braille proves to be much more difficult than expected. Marco first lets us try out what is known as \u201cblackboard writing\u201d: A small, firm sheet is clamped into a plastic template with no compartments for each six-dot letter and the individual dots are punched into it with a pricker. The tool is somewhat reminiscent of a leather punch or a burin – and thus of the development of writing by the young Frenchman Louis Braille (1809-1852), who was blinded in an accident in his father’s saddler’s workshop, but also found inspiration for his dice alphabet there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Punching dots into a piece of paper sounds easy? Not when you consider that you have to write from right to left and that every single letter has to be mirror-inverted. It really challenges my spatial imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s supposedly easier to write with a Braille typewriter. Marco has brought four Erikas with him, still made in the GDR. The machine has seven keys: a space bar and then dots 3, 2, 1 for the left hand and 4, 5 and 6 for the right hand. But that also requires a rethink. I wish the typewriter had simply drawn a cube and you could press the letter into the paper exactly as it looks! The only disadvantage would be that someone like Marco, who learned to write on the machine at school from an early age, would be nowhere near as fast as he is today with both hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thanks to computers and voice control, there are other aids to communication these days. \u201cBut I didn’t want to put on a show of aids here, I wanted to offer a workshop on writing!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end, we talk about sensitivity. For example, he ordered his T-shirt with embroidery in Braille in the color red on the Internet – and received it in purple. For a web store with such a clear target group, that’s a bit odd, not to say cheeky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together we try to read the text on the T-shirt. Yes, it was a successful day, because I can read: Get to the point. He has a clear opinion on how to deal with blind people, as Marco calls himself, on a day-to-day basis: \u201cLanguage shouldn’t be taken too seriously! Even if I never see you, you’re welcome to say goodbye to me.\u201d