Prosody Rule for Time Structure of Finger Braille

Finger braille is one of the communication methods for the deaf blind. The fingers of the deaf blind are regarded as keys of a brailler. Finger braille seems to be the most suited medium for real-time communication and for expressing the feelings of a speaker. We are trying to develop a finger braille receiver for teletext broadcasting system which will help the deaf blind to use current mass media. We assume that prosodic information is strongly needed to transform letters to finger braille. In this study, we analyzed the time structure of finger braille and found that it is influenced by the structure and meaning of the sentences. Based on the results, we construct a prosody rule for time structure. The validity of the rule was confirmed in an output experiment.