The writing of braille: hand, finger, and frequency effects on error and accuracy patterns

This article analyzes a corpus of 1,600 naturally occurring brailling errors made by one expert braillist to discover patterns of error and accuracy. It was found that, for this braillist, more errors were made with more frequently-occurring characters, the right (dominant) hand was more accurate than the left and that individual fingers contributed in different ways to error patterns. For this braillist, additions and deletions of dots tended to result in more symmetrical patterns of dots within cells. As more data are gathered from a wider range of subjects, it might be possible to determine what kinds of error and accuracy patterns are idiosyncratic to particular braillists and which are generally predictable given the cognitive and motor tasks inherent in brailling.