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31 January 2008

PIZZAQ -- translate this code


You tell me. 9 slices with shallots & garlic. I had a lonely 10-minute wait in a medical clinic examining room and found this on the sign outside the room. I copied it down as very carefully and precisely as I could, but I have no experience or practice with this particular code. (My Mom was expert at it and taught it at the Red Cross.) All I know is that a 14-year-old French boy invented this code.

Which raises a very interesting question. The Internet is a tsunami of helpful, clever solutions that bring a flood of enjoyable and practical gifts to all sorts of people with all sorts of challenges and special needs all over the world. But what is the intersection set between the Internet and blind users? What's on the Web for the blind? This is now on the Internet -- but how can a blind person grok it or access it? Do they make gizmos that turn ASCII into raised dot fingertip code?

5 comments:

Mike Stone said...

Are you sure you wrote that down right? From every source that I've been able to find, the only translations I can make come out to be gibberish. It's saying:

3:>3
or
3;>3

Depends on where third symbols dots are located. Left column or right column. Either way, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Anonymous said...

hey mike do not think of a language....think of it as a source of communiaction, but you are right, something is wrong because i know what it it is but i forgot the actual characters because i have not used them in a while...think of it as a code which is the original intention of the whole thing

James J. Olson said...

Yeah, i've been working on this too, and only end up with gibberish as well. And I'm not fluent in Gibber.

James J. Olson said...

Hmm. Further research indicates that this might be Grade 2 or contracted braille, which means we'd need an actual code sheet to tell us what this is supposed to mean.

James J. Olson said...

My spouse, who used to do braille translating and editing, says that he can't quite tell what it says, because the spacing is not clear.

He came up with possibly:

3B3