Blind also use AI for their homework. They use gestures and screen readers to navigate the phone, and can use apps like Perplexity to write essays or do research.
If they ask an AI to write them an essay, they will get a good one, and with some back and forth tailored to their liking. However, it might take them a while to write it.
The thing is, AIs follow the distribution that they were trained on, and the essays by sighted are much longer than the ones required from blind. AI without context can’t account for that, even if you say that “I’m blind” because it doesn’t really have the knowledge what implications it makes to the text.
To get results they want, you need to know how to prompt an AI. For example, one could want to write a single A3 piece of paper, and for most cases that is sufficient. We can actually do some math to figure out approximately how many words do we need to write if we need to fill it in a bit less than two pages.
A Braille writing device is sized to an A4 paper. Usually, a thick A3 paper is folded in half and inserted into the device. In russian that’s called a doubled-sheet.
A Braille device
A Braille device has 24 rows and each has 18 columns. This means a single page can fit in characters. And a whole doubled-sheet can fit in twice that ( characters).
According to AI, the average Russian word length in a written text is around 5.5 and using this we can approximate the amount of words that fit in on a double-sheet.
Usually, every word is followed up either by a space or a punctuation mark. So, actually a word on average takes up cells.
Then, to get the amount of words that fit in, we just divide that number of cells by the average word size, which gets us words.
So, if one wants to get an essay the size of a double-sheet, they can ask an AI for 130 word essay and be sure that it will fit it.
This note originated from a talk with my sister. We did these back of napkin calculations with my sister in the Airport when we visited our grandpa. I think the skill of approximate calculation is important. It allows one is able to immediately make a decision without needing precise tools. In this case it’s transforming the vague task of writing an essay into a concrete text of 130 words.
Moreover, we figured that she needs even less words because first few rows are for the name, date and title of the essay, which brings the word count to 110 words. This piece of knowledge made her jump in happiness.
She got good at prompting AI, and iterating with it she got an essay she wanted but it was always too long. Teachers themselves prefer when the writing is on a single double-sheet, it’s easier to store and handle. Now she is sure that the essay she writes will fit in with no hastle.