YouTube Deep Summary

[00:00] Let’s say one day you get into a terrible  accident and become blind. How can you read now? You *feel* the text. But not the way you feel  a good romance book, you literally feel it. With your fingers. So, how does that work? The visually impaired use a writing system [00:11] called braille. Grade 1 braille is just a  one-to-one representation of the alphabet and some characters. So, let’s learn it. This is a braille cell. It’s a 3x2 grid of dots than can be raised, or not raised,  which gives us 64 possible combinations. The [00:23] dots are numbered 1 through 6, going  from top to bottom in both columns. Every letter and character is  represented by a unique cell. For the alphabet, you really only have  to learn the first 10 letters though, as the rest is just a variation of those. Except  for w. Screw that letter, because the kid who invented braille was French, and they don’t  use that there. So it’s just kind of a random [00:40] character that doesn’t fit in, just like you. For the first 10 letters, you only need the top two rows. Luckily, they follow a nice  pattern that you can easily remember. That was a lie. It’s kind of a mess. For a, you raise the first one. B and [00:51] C are lines on the left and top respectively.  E and I are just the diagonals. And the rest, which is D, F, H, and J are the corners.  Oh yeah and G is just all of them. These 10 also represent the numbers,  which is easier to remember: 1, 2 and 3, use the smallest number of points, the  even numbers 4, 6, 8, and 0 are the corners, and the odd numbers 5 and 9 are diagonals. 7, which is  in the middle, is just the combination of 5 and 9. [01:13] For the next ten letters, k – t, you add  the third row and raise the bottom left dot, [01:17] and for u-z, you raise the whole bottom row.  And w is just a j or 0 with the 6 raised. This means: The next characters are numbers. Wanna  go back to letters? Use this. Make it capital? [01:26] Slap this in front. Add punctuation? Choose your  favorite, and yeah, now you can read braille. Or at least the basics, because grade 2 uses  more symbols and turns the English language into a bunch of abbreviations. But that  takes a while to learn and is confusing, so just stick with grade 1 for  now and you should be fine.