today is election day in Brazil. as I’m writing this, the votes are being counted after the election had been extended to end at 7 pm instead of 5 because of efforts by some people in the country to stop part of the population from voting.1
and, just as with every election, especially presidential elections like this one, there’s the fake news and internet trolls. some people were claiming to have removed the 3 key from the voting machines (which would make it impossible to vote for Lula, the left-wing incumbent whose party number is 13), even posting pictures of the detached key. actually, I think I saw two different people post the same picture of a detached 3 key, same hand, same background and all.
the picture was AI-generated. it does seem there were some cases of people gluing either the 3 or the 2 on voting machines to stop people from typing their candidates’ numbers, just like during the first round, but there was one telltale sign that the image I saw circulating of that 3 key claimed to have been pulled off the voting machine was fake: the braille on the key was wrong.
(an aside: as I’m writing this blog entry, I’m going back to my apartment after having voted today, because even though I moved two years ago, I still vote at my home state. I was at my parents’ house this weekend, and of course I took the opportunity to spend a day and a half with my parents and our dogs while I was there. I’m not watching the vote count right now, but I really hope Flávio doesn’t win.)
anyway, the braille on the key in the fake image had seven dots weirdly cramped into the space of one braille cell, in a way that not even eight-dot braille would do. if anything, it looked like ⠠ ⠿, two characters, with the lone dot of the first cell basically touching the bottommost left dot of the second cell. this was how I realized the image had to be fake. (it was also posted by a celebrity news account, basically a Brazilian analogue of Pop Crave and the like. that should have been enough to discredit the whole thing, honestly.)
this got me thinking about how braille works, because I was explaining to a friend on Twitter how exactly the braille was wrong. each language has different conventions for braille — the whole thing is actually a family of scripts that are all written on six-dot cells2, and the Wikipedia article on English braille itself is a fun read imo.
(if you’re wondering how the number 3 is actually written in braille, it’s ⠼⠉ — the first character is a number sign, which marks the beginning of a string of digits, and the second character is just the letter C. digits 1–9 and 0 in braille are just written with the symbols for the letters A–J, so the number sign is needed to mark that the digits are actually digits and not letters.)
the most fascinating braille writing system for me though has to be Japanese braille. Japanese’s writing system is certainly the most complicated writing system of any modern language, with two whole syllabaries and a logography in which a single character may have multiple readings. Japanese braille, on the other hand, is probably one of the simplest writing systems out there, braille or not. believe it or not, it doesn’t have logograms or even a distinction between the two different syllabaries: it’s an abugida, where 3 of the 6 dots represent the consonant of a syllable and the other 3 represent the vowel. (check out the Wikipedia article on Japanese braille.)
in fact, it’s not just Japanese that has a braille writing system that’s completely different from the writing system that sighted people use. the braille orthographies for Mandarin (both in the mainland and in Taiwan, because they have different standards) are semisyllabaries, so they’re phonetic, unlike Chinese characters. Hebrew braille is an impure abjad just like the Hebrew script, but it has different letters for b and v that in the Hebrew script are only optionally distinguished by diacritics. just go read the wiki articles for the individual orthographies please I’m not an expert on this
lastly, here’s some yellow tactile paving. it’s also used by visually impaired people, just like braille. did you know that tactile paving was invented in the sixties in Japan, and that the Japanese word for tactile paving is 点字ブロック tenji burokku, literally ‘braille blocks’?