4.3 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2025
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Built around a game of braille Scrabble, Emma Tracey presents a celebration of braille, 200 years after it was invented. Emma, who’s been blind since birth, talks to others who love the six tiny dots: Geerat Vermeij, one of the world’s leading experts in molluscs; Yetnebersh Nigussie, an Ethiopian lawyer, who describes her blindness as "a lottery I won at the age of five"; Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor who’s been a linguistic consultant on Star Trek and is on the US advisory board for messaging extra-terrestrial intelligence; Japanese concert pianist, Nobuyuki Tsujii, who learnt to play using braille music; and Emma's friend and Scrabble partner, Ellie. And there’s a chance encounter with the most famous braille user of them all, Stevie Wonder. But can braille survive with the ever-increasing supply of tech that allows blind people to listen to, rather than feel, information?
Presenter: Emma Tracey Producer: Adele Armstrong Sound design: Steve Brooke Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith
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0:00.0 | Okay, right then. |
0:05.0 | We have played a lot of Braille Scrabble. |
0:08.0 | Two, three, three, four. |
0:11.0 | Don't look. |
0:12.0 | I'm not looking. |
0:13.0 | Alright. |
0:14.0 | Sorry, I touched my letter before I took it out, which I realised then was cheating. |
0:18.0 | Five, six, seven. |
0:21.9 | Okay. |
0:22.6 | Beginning or the end of the alphabet? |
0:23.8 | Let's do the beginning. |
0:25.1 | Neither was like to lose, do we? |
0:26.6 | No. |
0:27.6 | Definitely not. |
0:28.7 | Things can get. |
0:30.3 | Huted. |
0:30.9 | Rorcus. |
0:32.1 | What have you got? |
0:35.4 | What have I got? |
0:36.4 | I know, they're funny ones, don't know? Is it put got? I know they're funny. Yeah. |
0:38.0 | Because they've got the braids there. |
0:45.8 | I can't imagine my life without braille. |
... |
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