Proust's Dutch treat Some of Marcel Proust's earliest manuscripts are the rough drafts he made of essays on the painters Chardin, Rembrandt, Watteau, Moreau and Monet, which were published posthumously with the extended reflection on literary criticism, Contre Sainte-Beuve 1 .

Proust conceived these various pieces on painters as a coherent whole, and wrote to his friend Pierre Mainguet, asking if La Revue hebdomadaire would be interested in publishing them: « Je viens d'écrire une petite étude de philosophie de l'art si le terme n'est pas trop prétentieux où j'essaye de montrer comment les grands peintres nous initient à la connaissance et à l'amour du monde extérieur, comment ils sont ceux 'par qui nos yeux sont déclos' et ouverts en effet sur le monde. In this sketchy theory of aesthetics, Proust suggests that artists act as opticians who open our eyes to their way of seeing the world.

Throughout his work, Proust develops the notion that the artist's vision of the world is expressed by his or her characteristic colour, tonality or style, reaching a resounding conclusion in Le Temps retrouvé, where he puts forward Dutch painting as a model: Proust uses the terms « rayon spécial » and elsewhere « phrasetype » to mean the distinctive originality of the painter, composer or writer. The references he makes to Dutch and Flemish art in the manuscript versions which pre-date the conception of his novel, in his personal letters, and in the definitive version of A la recherche du temps perdu, confirm the fundamental place it takes in his work, and suggest an aesthetic relationship between the Northern school of painting and Proust's writing.

Proust was a frequent and fervent visitor to the Louvre, where, as the following extract from a letter to his friend Reynaldo Hahn indicates, he happened upon The Banker and his Wife painted by Quentin Metsys in 1514 : « J'ai été avant-hier au Louvre (Aimez-vous Quentin Matsys […] l'homme qui a devant lui des pièces d'or, une petite glace bombée qui représente ce qui [se présente] dans la rue, des perles etc et à côté de lui sa femme). »4 (See figure 1).

Proust's formulation merits attention, as rather than using the first person to say what he saw, he addresses another viewer in the second person, implicitly inviting him to view this picture through his eyes.

Proust superimposes a critical dimension on the painting, varnishing it as it were with his own aesthetic taste.

Proust's retouching of the painting belongs to the series of artistic reproductions of this work. In fact, Metsys probably copied a painting Jan Van Eyck did some one hundred years earlier, which would explain why the costumes in The Banker and his Wife are oldfashioned. In his monumental seven hundred page opus on early In addition to the banker's gold coins, Proust noted the « perles etc » in the painting, suggesting that these various reflecting surfaces are a characteristic feature of Metsys's work. The painting is almost a study in catoptrics, as light also plays off the different glass objects, the embossed pewter dish, and the velvet of the wife's dress. Proust singles out the most intriguing element of the painting, the « petite glace bombée qui représente ce qui [se présente] la rue ». The convex mirror in the centre foreground is placed at an angle, so that it reflects the window on the left, which is the main source of light. The view of the street is presented through the double mediation of the mirror and the window, and includes in the distance a spire looming above the trees.

Metsys highlighted the two-way vision a window offers, as his reflected window has a strip of stained glass along its top, indicating that light is streaming in, while the transparent glass panes look outwards to the street scene. A man in a red cap, seated in front of the window, is also reflected in the mirror. He could be the banker's client, awaiting the verdict, as the banker assesses the value of his coins and jewels.

On the most mundane level, a mirror was used in sixteenth century bankers' shops as a talisman against burglary. However, the German cardinal and philosopher Nicolas de Cues, with whose ideas Metsys would have been familiar, sees the mirror as an image of the eye of God 6 . The religious message of the painting is expressed by the presence of numerous objects used in worship, such as the ornate book of hours, the six translucent glass prayer beads hanging from a hook, and the richly decorated and gilded mounted crystal vase. According to 16th century iconography, a closed box, such as the one on the lefthand side of the lower shelf, contains divinity and the transparent glass carafe above it symbolizes the Virgin 7 .

Thus, the painting is more than just a realist, workaday scene, it « is more of a sermon than a satire 8 ». It conveys a moral message, or warning, as suggested by the gesture of the old man admonishing the younger man who can be seen on the street through the half-open door behind the couple. De Cues also proposes the image of the moneychanger as God's representative on earth. He could discern and assess real worth, but he was limited in that he only had the power of knowledge, not the divine power of creation 9 . This painting clearly establishes an analogy between the banker, who is weighing coins, and God weighing souls at the Last Judgment. The edifiying intention of the work was specified by an inscription added to the frame in the mid 17th century, a Latin quotation from Leviticus, which translates into English: « Do not use dishonest standards when measuring length, weight or quantity 10 », and invites a reading of it as an illustration of this Biblical passage.

However, as the construction of meaning in this painting is constantly undermined by its deconstruction, its interpretation is challenging, complex and contradictory. Christ 11 », but the one in this painting, on the righthand lower shelf, has ominously gone out. Similarly, the exotic fruit on the upper back shelf refers to Eve and original sin, but is also associated with the purity of the Virgin 12 . The wife's attention has strayed from the book of hours -her tightly closed lips prove that she is not chanting the prayers. Her crossed-over hands and the position of the pages indicate that she is going through this holy book heretically, that is to say both backwards and forwards. In fact, her bony hands are in the same position as those of her husband, pointing to her avarice and role as a partner in trade, suggesting perhaps that this richly decorated book of hours has been offered as a gage, which it is the wife's job to evaluate.

The mirror is the most ambiguous element of The Banker and his Wife, as we have seen that it is the 16th century equivalent of the electronic surveillance eye, as well as the eye of God. It is the symbol of vanity but also of truth, and of prudence, allowing Man to see and thus correct his or her faults. Its central, foreground position likens it to the memento mori in Holbein's The Ambassadors, and the gaunt, spectrelike figure reflected in Metsys's mirror could represent death. As he is clad in red, he could also denote the heretical and the Satanic. The convex mirror recalls the one hanging on the back wall in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding, which reflects the presence of the artist as well as witnesses testifying the scene.

All of the painting's ambiguities subvert or even invert an initial reading of it, posing the basic question of the discrepancy between genuine value and purported worth, between the represented and its representation. Even the title of the painting -The Banker and his Wife -is put to question, because the value of their wedding rings seems cheapened by the numerous pawned rings on the graduated ringholder near the husband's right hand. The painting stages exchange, as the banker's activity is to weigh the coins, to ascertain whether they are equal to their numeric sign. The theme of the unquantifiable variables of loss and gain is repeated throughout the painting, from the nested brass weights which the husband uses as standards, to the records of 11 Panofsky op. cit. vol. 1,p. 202. financial transactions on the shelves behind him. The painting contains a reflection on pictorial representation, as the artist's inscription Quinten schildert can be read on a folded piece of parchment. It puts into play various optical perceptions : the objects on the wooden shelves behind the couple are executed in perfect trompe-l'oeil and are given such depth that we feel we could lift them off. Metsys has made me victim of another optical illusion, because I see the man as examining a coin held between his fingers, not holding a balance, which blends in with his dark clothes and is only materialized in the round shadows on the green baize tablecloth. The mirror creates several optical illusions, as the image in it is necessarily inverted, and its convex surface adds a further distorsion. This spherical mirror tricks us into thinking that the small figure near the window is far away, whereas if we were to reconstruct the space of this scene, we would discover that we are closer to him than to the couple. The mirror creates a mise en abyme, bringing the outside inside, with a double framework delineating the streetscape outside the reflected window and the reading man in front of it.

The man by the window is one of three figures in red associated with reading: the scarlet Madonna in the illuminated manuscript is holding a closed black book, and she could be seen as a miniaturised reflection of the banker's wife, who is turning the pages of her book.

The numerous books in this painting invite an interpretation of it as an allegory of reading. The book is given a significant place, on the top shelf behind the couple, at the peak of the triangle their figures form.

The very composition of this painting, with the central dividing line resulting from the join of the two wooden planks, suggests an open book. The two characters, whose heads are tilted towards each other, would fold over each other if the book were closed. The strong horizontal lines of the back shelves, the wooden bench the couple are seated on, and the table's edge all suggest lines of writing. The painting could be seen as The Book, open to this illustration of the passage from Leviticus. It might also be a projection of the reading man's imagination, the image the text gives rise to in his mind, his subjective interpretation of what he reads. Proust may well have been drawn to Metsys's depiction of the activity of reading, as it emphasizes the role of the reader in literary commerce. In his terms, the book is a kind of mirror which reflects the reader : « chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. L'ouvrage de l'écrivain n'est qu'une espèce d'instrument optique qu'il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n'eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. 13 » The reader re-writes the text, projecting his or her own images onto it.

Similarly, for Proust a painting is a kind of magic mirror 14 which allows the viewers to see their own reflections and even images of the past.

According to Proust, art is a kind of Dutch treat, as painter and viewer, writer and reader alike actively contribute to artistic creation.

The convex mirror Proust focused on in Metsys's work paints in the space where the spectator stands. Although it is slightly askew, it elicits spectator participation, inviting him or her to peer into it.

Whereas Metsys frequently painted grotesque figures whose faces seem to be reflected in a distorting mirror, in The Banker and his Wife, the characters are portrayed without a hint of caricature, but the convex mirror in the foreground will tease the spectator.

The mirror adds a dimension to the painting, creating a boundary between represented space and the space in which the painter and the spectator stand. The edge of table in the shadow in the foreground, marked by a leather strip held in place by brass tacks, creates a viewing area in front of it, and serves as a framing device within the picture. Metsys has included the viewer in his work, as a spectral reflection : this virtual figure is the counterpart in painting to Gerald Prince's « narratee » in literature, and could thus be dubbed the « spectatee » 15 . In Metsys's work, the spectatee is positioned on the line of the vanishing point, which is outside the window, beyond its central divide and the aligned church spire. The lines in this reflecting source of light draw the painting out, towards the viewer. As the shape of the mirror suggests, the spectatee is the central eye of the picture. Proust concludes his essay with a fictitious narrative of a visit to a Rembrandt exhibit in Amsterdam. His attention is drawn not to the paintings on display, but to a tottering old man, leaning on his housekeeper for support, whom another visitor identifies as the aged Ruskin. For Proust, the view of the critic revarnishes the canvas and adds another aesthetic layer to it, even retouching it with his personal colouring. Proust's essay dwells longer on the spectator than on Rembrandt's works, and the narrator even begins to view this prestigious viewer as another Rembrandt, framing the spectatee as a painting: The foreground of Vermeer's Sleeping Servant, which looks like an anachronistic still-life by Cézanne, is a table which serves as a barrier between the viewer and what is viewed. The spectator cannot go beyond the edge of the table, although he is invited to advance far enough to brush up against the ornate, richly textured cloth.

The same elements -the table and the « tapis » the narrator points out to Albertine -can be seen in the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, where Vermeer deepens the space allotted to the spectatee, by painting in a kind of trompe-l'oeil curtain in the foreground (see figure 2). It has surreptiously been drawn aside, inviting the spectator to witness this intimate scene, and, to quote Lawrence Gowing's book on Vermeer, it « subtly claims a place both in the letter reader's world and ours » 27 . [...] Enfin il fut devant le Ver Meer qu'il se rappelait plus éclatant, plus différent de tout ce qu'il connaissait, mais où, grâce à l'article du critique, il remarqua pour la première fois des petits personnages en bleu, que le sable était rose, et enfin la précieuse matière du tout petit pan de mur jaune 36 .

The Art of

Proust insists that a critic determined Bergotte's decision to go to the exhibit, and even guided his viewing of the painting, but he is the first 33 Gustave Vanzype, Jan Vermeer de Delft. Nouvelle édition revue et augmentée. to point out the « petit pan de mur jaune », mentioned by neither of his French predecessors.

But this passage on the View of Delft is not so much an ekphrasis as it is the account of a dramatic action, Bergotte's fatal attraction to the « petit pan de mur jaune ». In focusing more attention on the viewing subject than on Vermeer's work, Proust emphasizes the vital role of the spectatee, who brings the painting alive at the cost of his own life. Proust's staging of its viewing suggests that the painting remains a two-dimensional topographical representation of the town until a spectator interacts with the work by looking at it. To mark this work with a touch of autobiography, may I corroborate that viewing this painting is an active experience, by recalling my most memorable visit to the Mauritshuis in the Hague, when I discovered that this painting has an anamorphic quality to it. As I moved in front of the painting, the cubic composition of roofs, house-walls and spires seemed to pop up into three dimensions, like a cardboard cut-out model, proving just how much Escher owes to this three hundred year old work by his compatriot. Walking from the left of the painting to its center provoked the physical sensation of softly gliding along in a boat, while the canal with a bridge over it seemed to flow deeper and deeper into the heart of the town.

By attaching less importance to the painting than to Bergotte's reaction to it, Proust has seen the originality of Ver Meer, who proposes a view of Delft without addressing his viewer or directing him where to stand. This feature of the painting is most eloquently analyzed by Norman Bryson, who explains that during the Italian Renaissance, painters learned to use perspective, presenting their work as in a theatre, and turning their figures towards the spectator in direct invocation, whereas:

The View of Delft belongs to a different spatial regime and stages nothing: it is a vision of the inadvertent, vision in inadvertency. [...] [t]he spectator is an unexpected presence, not a theatrical audience ; nothing in the scene arranges itself around his act of inspection, or asks him, in Albertian fashion, to place his body at this particular point at which the founding perception was 'gathered '. 37 It has been argued that Vermeer presented a slice of life in this painting, capturing the sense of immediacy by using the camera obscura, which would also account for its arbitrary framing and presenting 38 . It is therefore not surprising that this View of Delft has the quality of a poor holiday snapshot taken in the days before cameras had built-in automatic zooms which can edit out unsightly expanses of seemingly irrelevant cloudy sky and sandy foreground. To pursue this photographic imagery, the viewer could be said to act as the « sensitive plate », as he or she even develops the painting by looking at it. Vermeer leaves room, but neither directions nor orders, for the spectatee, issuing an invitation to make the painting his or her own by viewing, reproducing or reworking it. Like the book, Proust considered the painting as a mirror, the reader and the viewer as partners in art. The phrase: « le petit pan de mur jaune avec un auvent » has fired much critical debate, and commentators are categorical and opposed in their definitions of its exact reference. Some insist that it can only be the yellow, pink and greenish patch of city wall on the extreme right of the canvas, taking the drawbridge to be the sunshade Proust mentions. Others, myself included, think Proust is referring to the sloping roof with a dormer window, which he mentioned as the « pignons de maison » in his letter to Vaudoyer, and which he mistakes as a wall when writing his novel. The roof is reflecting such intense sunlight that the eye is irresistibly attracted to it.

The debate over the identification of the « pan de mur jaune » is futile, and merely proves Proust's point that a work of art is open to various plausible interpretations. The « pan » reflecting the sun also reflects us : it is an area onto which we can project ourselves, as well as a source of illumination. The « pan » in painting corresponds to the blanks on the page, the area onto which viewer and reader can project themselves. Bergotte was struck by Vermeer's perfectly painted patch of yellow wall, which threw implacable illumination onto his own writing : « C'est ainsi que j'aurais dû écrire, disait-il. Mes derniers livres sont trop secs, il aurait fallu passer plusieurs couches de couleur, rendre ma phrase en elle-même précieuse, comme ce petit pan de mur jaune. 48 » Proust draws an explicit analogy between literature and painting here, inspired perhaps by Vermeer's numerous depictions of the different stages of reading and writing letters. In A Lady Writing, the writer, set against a dark background, is looking straight at us, as if she were addressing the letter to the spectatee. In the Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid, the lady is bent over the epistle while the maid is standing by waiting to deliver it. In The Love Letter, the maid has just delivered the sealed letter, and the lady is looking at her inquiringly. In Mistress and Maid, communication lines have been crossed : the mistress, whose hand is on her chin in interrogation, is interrupted in her writing, as the maid has just delivered a letter. Proust's Remembrance of Things Past will only be illuminated if there is a reader to serve as reflector. In Proustian terms, the literary work is conceived in silence and in the dark, during the intimate exchange of writer and reader : « le livre est l'enfant du silence et de l'obscurité ». This conception of literature is opposed to that of Ruskin, who considers reading as a conversation with the writer, and also to that of Sainte-Beuve, who is interested in the writer as a social being.

2 »1

 2 They are classed by the Cabinet des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale as Proust 45 (N.A.Fr. 16636 f°62 -92), and were first published by Gallimard in 1954, presented by Bernard de Fallois, in Nouveaux Mélanges. They have been re-printed in the volume of Proust's works entitled Contre Sainte-Beuve, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris : Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1971), pp. 372-382 and 659-677. (This volume is referred to henceforth in this article as CSB). 2 See Marcel Proust, Correspondance, edited by Philip Kolb (Paris Plon, 1970), volume I p. 446, letter dated the end of November 1895. (This edition of Proust's correspondence in 21 volumes, published between 1970 and 1993, is henceforth referred to as Corres, followed by the number of the volume in Roman numerals).

  Flemish painting, Erwin Panofsky devotes only half a paragraph to this work by Metsys, qualifying it as self-consciously archaic and identifying is as a « reconstruction » of the Van Eyck original, which has now disappeared 5 . Metsys's painting was frequently imitated, notably by Marinus van Reymerswaele, who made several pastiches of it, interpreting the scene as a double portrait of avarice, and erasing all spirituality from the original by replacing the woman's prayerbook with an account book. Metsys's painting was also reproduced in 1630, by Willem van Haecht in his Apelles Painting Campaspe. In this mise en abyme, The Banker and his Wife can be seen in the front right hand corner of the painting, which depicts an art studio with the artist at work. In his miniaturised copy of the Metsys painting, Van Haecht metamorphoses the Madonna and Child of the prayer book into Adam and Eve. It is plausible that Proust saw this painting on painting in the Hague, as it belonged to Willem V, before joining the collection of the Mauritshuis. Proust defines the subject of The Banker and his Wife as « [un] homme qui a devant lui des pièces d'or ». Metsys's work belongs to the tradition of genre painting, and depicts a contemporary shopfront scene in the trading port and 16th century financial center of Antwerp. The exact function of the banker is unclear -he might be a moneylender, as the promissory notes on the shelves behind him would suggest, or a money changer, as the coins he is examining are from various foreign origins; he might also be a pawnbroker, as the jewels and the pouch of pearls seem to indicate. Whatever, he is successful, and the couple is reasonably wealthy, as their fur collars and cuffs and the wife's decorative gold wristband denote. Proust brings out the symmetrical composition of The Banker and his Wife (« l'homme [...] et à côté de lui sa femme »). Metsys painted it on two wooden boards of equal width and the join can be seen, as it runs through the spine of the open book on the top shelf and passes to the left of the mirror. The painting is constructed as a symmetrical reflection, as if a mirror were placed along the central divide: the left part, cast in darker hues, seems to reflect the brighter right side. This composition suggests the two symbolically opposed realms of money and spirituality. The husband's banking objects are cast in the shadow of Mammon, whereas the wife's spiritual book seems to be bathed in celestial light.

  Gerald Prince : 'Introduction to the Study of the Narratee', in Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 7 -25. Quentin Metsys does not figure in A la recherche du temps perdu, nor in Proust's manuscript essays on painting, where Rembrandt is granted pride of place. Proust devoted eight large folios to this painter he qualified as one of his favorites 16 , beginning with a preliminary definition of Rembrandt's « phrase-type », pointing out the recurrent features of his work : « les vieilles coupeuses d'ongles, peigneuses de cheveux fins, la femme triste et modeste sous ses fourrures et sous ses perles, la maison où le feu s'allume dans l'ombre des pièces obscures, ce ne sont pas des choses que Rembrandt a peintes, ce sont les goûts de Rembrandt 17 ». The last element enumerated here -« la maison où le feu s'allume dans l'ombre des pièces obscures » -is a leitmotif in Rembrandt's work, which is composed in the shady tones of this characteristic light. It is his own special colour, his « rayon » as Proust calls it, which he projects onto the outside world, bathing it in his particular light. Rembrandt's works reveal a source of illumination in the depth of dusky shadows, a lighting effect which Proust recognized in his own experience. In his novel, he describes the effect the rays of the setting sun produce in the Grand Hôtel de Balbec as a Rembrandt painting: « un crépuscule, où Rembrandt découpe tantôt l'appui d'une fenêtre ou la manivelle d'un puits. [...] à chaque étage une lueur d'or reflétée sur le tapis annonçait le coucher du soleil et la fenêtre des cabinets. 18 » Proust sees the outside world through Rembrandt's tinted glasses, his shades, and his characteristic hues are projected onto the outside world : the panes of glass in the bookcases reflecting and framing the visual effect. In his manuscript essay, Proust associates the quality of light in Rembrandt's works with the artist's inner world: « Ce sont les goûts de Rembrandt, et cette lumière où sont ses portraits et ses tableaux, c'est en quelque sorte le jour même de sa pensée, l'espèce 16 In a questionnaire he responded to at about the age of twenty. See CSB 337. 17 All of the following quotes from Proust's manuscript essay on Rembrandt can be found in Proust 45 (N.A.Fr. 16636 f° 74 r° et v°, 75, 76, 77, 78), and transcribed in CSB 659 -664. 18 RTP II 158. de jour particulier dans lequel nous voyons les choses, au moment où nous pensons d'une façon originale. » According to Proust, the originality of Rembrandt's work is that he paints a kind of twilight zone, in which subjectivity is projected onto objects in the outside world. As the very subject of his painting The Philosopher in Meditation suggests, Rembrandt's distinguishing « phrase-type » is the representation of thought: « le but de l'organisation de l'artiste étant de donner intégralement telle ou telle pensée ». The painting Proust calls Les Deux Philosophes (The Louvre, 1632) actually depicts only one philosopher and probably a servant stoking the fire, who are separated by a central, deformed spiral staircase. The scene is framed by a dark rounded border of a wall, which creates a circular composition of reflections in a golden eye. The painting is a distorsion of objective reality, and a penetration into the subjective eye/I: it looks like the artist's eye staring at us. Proust confers the status of « phrase-type » to the eyes in Rembrandt's paintings, which convey inner thought : ce regard du poète qui se redit les vers avec tout leur sens, de l'Homère, ce regard qui voit toutes les misères, qui a toutes les tendresses et qui a comme envie de pleurer, du Christ des Pèlerins d'Emmaüs ; et qui [...] ont les yeux non pas droits et fiers, mais fixes, remplis d'une pensée que c'est notre pensée qui recueille et reconnaît dans leurs orbites respectueuses de ce qu'ils contiennent, et tendus à ne pas la laisser échapper [...], comme si toute grande pensée, d'Homère ou du Christ, était plus grande qu'euxmêmes, comme si penser grandement, profondément, c'était justement penser avec un tel respect qu'on ne laisse rien échapper de la pensée. Proust focuses on the gaze the painter directs to the spectatee: « Mais ayant achevé sa toile, c'est plus dégagé de pensée que Rembrandt au fond de sa toile nous regarde [...] ». He points out how Rembrandt engages an exchange of questions and answers with his spectatee: « au fond de chacune de ses toiles, il semble que son regard soit au moment où, encore tendu sur la réalité qu'il avait essayé de saisir, [il était] déjà détaché de cet effort par la réalisation libératrice et nous demandant en quelque sorte 'Est-ce cela ?' ou disant 'Voilà'. » Rembrandt's prolific production of self-portraits can be viewed as a long dialogue with the spectatee. Each one establishes eye-contact between the artist and the viewing subject. Proust would have seen the 1633 oval portrait in the Louvre, set in a frame resembling a mirror, in which Rembrandt depicted himself in cap and gold chain. He would also have known the reflective gaze in the portrait of the artist as an old man, painted at his easel, in 1660.

  abbreviated references to Vermeer's Sleeping Servant, which Proust had seen in the private collection of Rodolphe Kahn. The brass knobs on a leather chair, as well as the embroidered drap in the foreground, are motifs Vermeer repeated in other paintings, constituting thus his

24

  See L'Amour de l'art, January 1936, pp. 7 -15. 25 See Corres XVIII p. 321, letter dated July 10 1919 to Walter Berry.26 See Charles Seymour, Jr. : « Dark Chamber and Light-filled Room : Vermeer and the Camera Obscura », in The ArtBulletin, vol. XLVI, n° 3, September 1964, pp. 323 -331.

  Painting contains a similar curtain, from behind which the spectatee is stealing a glance at the painter at work. Proust recognized that by giving us only a back view of the self-effacing painter, Vermeer left his work to the subjective interpretation of the viewer or critic: « Cet artiste de dos qui ne tient pas à être vu de la postérité et ne saura pas ce qu'elle pense de lui est une admirable idée poignante. 28 » The brass chandelier reflects the scene on its curved surface, including the leaded panes of the window to the left and a front view of the artist. Logically, the spherical base of the chandelier, like the convex mirror in Metsys's The Banker and his Wife, should also be reflecting the spectator, but Vermeer has solved that technical problem by running an ornamental band through what would otherwise be our image. Proust hoped that as war damages, France would acquire Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, which is still in Dresden, and The Art of Painting, of which the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is proud possessor 29 . His particular interest in these paintings might well result from the way Vermeer includes the spectatee in them. He would also have noticed how they both contain patches of sun-drenched wall which, according to Proust, compose Vermeer's « phrase-type ». He would also have admired the cool, pale morning light reflecting off the white plaster in the much publicized Milkmaid, which he had seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, before seeing it again at the 1921 Paris exhibit. These characteristic expanses of blank yellow form a kind of screen onto which the spectatee can project. Significantly, in the paintings where the figure addresses the spectatee directly -for 27 Lawrence Gowing, Vermeer (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 99. 28 Corres XX p. 263, letter dated May 14 1921 to Jean-Louis Vaudoyer. example in the Girl with a Pearl Earring which Proust knew and loved 30 -the dark backdrop invites no such projection. Either the spectatee's presence is hidden and intrusive, and reflected onto the « pan de mur jaune », or it is established by an exchange of looks with the person painted against what seems to be the reverse side of a mirror. It was on a postcard of the Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window that Paul Morand wrote from a village in Saxony, near Dresden, claiming that he had insisted the Jeu de Paume exhibit include the View of Delft for Proust's sake 31 . To a very real extent, this Vermeer painting, painting owes its celebrity to French promotion, starting in the middle of the last century, when the art historian Etienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré rediscovered the artist he nicknamed the Sphinx of Delft, and published his pioneering work under the pseudonym of William Bürger 32 . The French publicity campaign for Vermeer launched by Thoré-Bürger was pursued by the flashy, fashionable aesthete, Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, who, on the occasion of the Paris exhibition boasting three works by Vermeer, wrote a study of the artist which was published in the periodical L'Opinion, in April and May 1921. Reading these articles renewed Proust's interest in Vermeer, whose work he had discovered and admired during his visit to Holland in October 1902. He asked Vaudoyer to accompany him to the Paris exhibit, insisting that the presence of the critic would enhance his appreciation of the paintings. In thanking Vaudoyer for the guided tour, he shows how the art was coloured for him by the circumstances and the company in which he saw it, and, after a loose paraphrase from the articles in l'Opinion, he evokes the notion of the « phrase-type »: 30 See Corres XXI, p. 615, letter dated shortly before 28 June 1907 to the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay : « cette vue de Delft me semble un des cinq ou six plus beaux tableaux que je connaisse dans le monde entier, ainsi qu'une femme du même Ver Meer à la Haye aussi ». 31 Corres XX p. 222 -223, dated 1 May 1921. The painting is in the Mauritshuis, in the Hague, and dates from circa 1660. 32 See in particular : Musée de la Hollande 1858, pp. 272 -273, and the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, October 1866, pp. 298 -299. Je garde le souvenir lumineux du seul matin que j'aie revue [sic] et où vous avez guidé si affectueusement mes pas qui chancelaient trop, vers ce Ver Meer où les pignons des maisons 'sont comme de précieux objets chinois'. Depuis j'ai pu me procurer un ouvrage belge 33 dont les nombreuses reproductions, regardées avec votre article à la main, m'ont permis de reconnaître dans des tableaux différents des accessoires identiques. 34 This autobiographical event, which ironically resembles the visit to the Rembrandt exhibit he had invented many years earlier, is recast as an episode in La Prisonnière, where the writer Bergotte, a character in part inspired by Ruskin, makes an ultimate outing to see the work of « un artiste à jamais inconnu, à peine identifié sous le nom de Ver Meer 35 », where Proust loosely paraphrases Vaudoyer: un critique ayant écrit que dans la Vue de Delft de Ver Meer (prêté par le musée de la Haye pour une exposition hollandaise), tableau qu'il adorait et croyait connaître très bien, un petit pan de mur jaune (qu'il ne se rappelait pas) était si bien peint qu'il était, si on le regardait seul, comme une précieuse oeuvre d'art chinoise, d'une beauté qui se suffisait à elle-même.

  Bruxelles(Paris: Librairie nationale d'art et d'histoire, G. Van Oest et cie, 1921), in 4°. 84 pages, 37 reproductions. The first edition had appeared in 1908. 34 Corres XXI, p. 291 -292 letter dated 17 June 1922. 35 RTP III 693. 36 RTP III 692. This passage is a late addition to the novel, written in Cahier 62, (N.A.Fr. 16702 f° 57 and 58 r° et v°), under the title « Pour la mort de Bergotte ». That preliminary version was typed and added to the third typescript of La Prisonnière : N.A.Fr. 16746 f° 89, bearing the title « Mort de Bergotte ».

  The phrase « le petit pan de mur jaune » gives an indelibly Proustian colour to the View of Delft 39 . As Philippe Boyer in his essay entitled Le petit pan de mur jaune writes : « ce tableau-fenêtre[...] creuse dans la Vue de Delft une Vue de Proust 40 ». In the small book Petit pan de mur jaune, the extract narrating Bergotte's death is preceded by an article entitled Les écarts d'une vision by Jean Pavans. He relates his visit to the 1986 Vermeer exhibit in Paris, making the point that for the reader of Proust, the corpse of Bergotte lies in the foreground of this painting : 37 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting : The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), page 111. 38 cf. Gowing, op. cit. p. 128. 39 Many years before writing this passage, Proust had sent holiday tips to his friend the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay, expressing his admiration for this Vermeer painting in superlative terms. See Corres XXI, p. 615, letter dated shortly before 28 June 1907 to the Princesse de Caraman-Chimay: « Le tableau que j'ai le plus aimé en Hollande [...] c'est la Vue de Delft de Vermeer, au musée de la Haye. » 40 Philippe Boyer, Le petit pan de mur jaune (Paris : Seuil, 1987), p. 22. En face, finalement, de l'oeuvre originale, mon émotion a été aussi forte que je l'espérais, mais quelle était encore la source véritable de cette émotion ? C'était bien entendu le souvenir de la mort de Bergotte, de ces pages à travers le filtre desquelles le chef-d'oeuvre existait pour moi depuis près de vingt ans. 41 If thanks to Swann, Vermeer's name was as familiar to Odette as that of her dressmaker 42 , so it can be argued that Vermeer's general popularity is indebted to Proust : « La vérité, c'est que Proust a appris le nom de Vermeer, non pas aux connaisseurs, mais au grand public, et parce que ce grand public admirait Proust il s'est mis à admirer Vermeer. 43 » Proust's passage on the View of Delft has ensured the critical fortune of the painting, but, as Daniel Arasse writes in L'Ambition Vermeer, it has also blurred our vision of it : « Le prestige de La Recherche trouble l'approche actuelle de Vermeer. 44 » It must be thanks to one of France's greatest men of letters that the museum shop of the Mauritshuis in the Hague sells greeting cards of the detail of the sloping roof ; the author who celebrated involuntary memory would have smiled to see for sale tiny books, with the View of Delft on the cover, containing a pad of appropriately blank yellow pages, designed with one sticky side to be used to voluntarily jog memory. He would probably have experienced anxiety in recognizing his influence on Estève Non's experimental -and ephemeral -novel, which took the form of an exhibit of a series of photographs entitled Le petit pan de mur jaune de Vermeer. These photographs, which « narrate » an amnesiac's awakening in hospital, with a patch of yellow as sole memory, were 41 Jean Pavans, Les écarts d'une vision (Paris : Editions de la différence, (collection) « Tableaux vivants », 1986), p. 41. 42 RTP I 460. 43 François Fosca, De Diderot à Valéry : les écrivains et les arts visuels, (Paris: Albin Michel, 1960), p. 77. 44 Daniel Arasse, L'Ambition Vermeer (Paris: Adam Biro, 1993), p. 180, note 9. displayed along the exhibit's walls, so that the book was read by literally reading the walls 45 . Proust's « petit pan de mur jaune » has become an icon of contemporary art criticism. Georges Didi-Huberman in his essay La part de l'oeil based his notion of the visual, blank but luminous area in a painting on Proust's phrase, calling it a « pan 46 ». Daniel Arasse illustrates his concept of Le Détail 47 with the same passage from the Recherche, as Proust considers the « petit pan de mur jaune » as « une précieuse oeuvre d'art chinoise, d'une beauté qui se suffisait à ellemême », a miniature work of art contained in the larger painting; the part which, as the verb « détailler » suggests, can be cut away from the whole.

45

  Estève Non, Le petit pan de mur jaunede Vermeer, roman (Paris: Balland, 1974). The book describes the novel which was exhibited at the Daniel Templon gallery in Paris, during the autumn of 1973. 46 The essay was reworked and published under the title L'Aporie du détail at the end of Devant l'image, 1990. Didi-Huberman explores the same notion of the « pan » in his book Fra Angelico, Dissemblance et Figuration, (Paris:Flammarion, Éditions de Minuit 1995). 47 Daniel Arasse, Le Détail, (Paris: Flammarion, 1992).

  As a recurrent motif in these paintings of reading and writing, an open window symbolically suggests communication between the outside and inner worlds, just as the opening and closing of the window mimics the folding and unfolding of the letter. The window is the surface on which both writer and reader can project their reflections. In Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, which stages the reception of the letter, ascribing importance to the active contribution reading makes to literary creation, the window mirroring the reading girl is a graphic representation of Proust's notion that the reader is reflected in the text.Proust's interest in these paintings of literary exchange has been followed by a fashion in contemporary publishing to illustrate works of literary criticism with Vermeer's reading scenes. Terry Eagleton's introduction to the subject : Literary Theory 49 has Mistress and Maid as its cover, whereas Juliet Dusinberre's book on Virginia Woolf's 48 RTP III 692. 49 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Renaissance essays uses Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid 50 , and the publisher Macmillan takes the same painting as the cover of their 1997 catalogue: Literature and Cultural Studies. Proustian aesthetics mistake painting and literature as identical twin sister arts : both are carried out in the camera obscura, and both require the active contribution of the viewer or reader to be brought and kept alive. Proust narrates the creative activity of viewing painting when the narrator visits Elstir's studio in Balbec, which is described in terms of a magnified camera obscura. The viewer and the painter pursue their complementary activities inside this huge optical instrument, complete with mirror, projection screen, refracting prismatic glass, and a concentrated, channelled source of light: Les stores étaient clos de presque tous les côtés, l'atelier était assez frais et, sauf à un endroit où le grand jour apposait au mur sa décoration éclatante et passagère, obscur ; seule était ouverte une petite fenêtre rectangulaire encadrée de chèvrefeuilles qui, après une bande de jardin, donnait sur une avenue ; de sorte que l'atmosphère de la plus grande partie de l'atelier était sombre, transparente et compacte dans sa masse, mais humide et brillante aux cassures où la sertissait la lumière, comme un bloc de cristal de roche dont une face déjà taillée et polie, çà et là, luit comme un miroir et s'irise. Tandis qu'Elstir, sur ma prière, continuait à peindre, je circulais dans ce clair-obscur, m'arrêtant devant un tableau puis devant un autre. 51 In his own writing, Proust borrows this optical instrument from Dutch painters. A la recherche du temps perdu is created in a camera obscura, into which a ray of light from the outside penetrates -under the door in the opening passage of Combray, through the slit at the top of the curtains at the beginning of La Prisonnière. The inaugural scene of Proust's novel, which casts both its light and shadow over the entire work, is set in a Rembrandtesque dark room, with a patch of luminous wall : « C'est ainsi que, pendant longtemps, quand, réveillé la nuit, je 50 Juliet Dusinkerne, Vigiania Woolf's Renaissance Human Reader or Conno-Reader? (London: MacMillan, 1997) 51 RTP II 191. me ressouvenais de Combray, je n'en vis jamais que cette sorte de pan lumineux, découpé au milieu d'indistinctes ténèbres 52 ».

  Figure 1 Quentin Metsys : The Banker and his Wife (1514), Louvre, Paris, Oil on wood, 0.70 x 0.67 m.

Figure 2 Vermeer,

 2 Figure 2 Vermeer, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window (1657 -1658), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. Oil on canvas, 0. 83 x O.64,5 m.

  Grâce à l'art, au lieu de voir un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons se multiplier, et autant qu'il y a d'artistes originaux, autant nous avons de mondes à notre disposition, plus différents les uns des autres que ceux qui roulent dans l'infini et, bien des siècles après qu'est éteint le foyer dont il émanait, qu'il s'appelât Rembrandt ou Ver Meer, nous envoient encore leur rayon spécial. 3

On closer examination, the objects depicted in The Banker and his Wife are far from unambiguously pious. A burning candle is a « symbol of the all-seeing 6 Cf. Nicolas de Cues: Le Tableau ou la vision de Dieu, 1453. Translated by

	Agnès Minazzoli, (Paris : Les Éditions du Cerf, 1986), p. 47.
	7 cf. Panofsky op. cit. vol. 1, p. 144.
	8 Larry Silver: The Paintings of Quinten Massys (Oxford : Phaidon, 1984),
	p. 137.
	9 See Le Jeu de la boule, in OEuvres choisies de Nicolas de Cues, presented by
	Maurice de Gandillac, (Paris : Aubier, 1942), pp. 537 -538.
	10 Leviticus XIX, 35: « Stature justa et aequa sint pondere ».

See Marcel Proust : A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris : Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, in

volumes, brought out under the direction ofJean-Yves Tadié, 1987 -1989), volume IV, p. 474. This edition of Proust's novel is henceforth referred to as RTP, followed by the number of the volume in Roman numerals, and the page number. 4 Corres II p. 119, letter written the 3rd or the 4th of September 1896.

See Erwin Panofsky Early Netherlandish Painting, (Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953), Volume 1, p. 354.


Anupama Thomas

Elizabeth Rufus
email: elizabethrufus@vit.ac.in

Investigations on Laterotactile Braille Reading

Keywords:

Unlike sighted readers who read whole words at a glance, braille readers construct words sequentially processing them character by character as their tactual field of view is small. Using this aspect of braille reading, we conducted an experimental study to investigate whether nonsensical characters moving under the reading finger would be a hindrance in reading words .We used a prototype to display braille with a single actuator .There is a lateral presentation of text to the user using a 3D printed braille embossed disc which rotates under the reading finger of the blind person. Preliminary test results indicate that users can read words even as nonsensical letters brush past the reading finger. This feature has implications in the design of a cost effective braille display.

Introduction

Much research has gone into studying aspects of braille reading and also designing braille displays for visually impaired people. A braille cell in its standard format can be a 6 dot cell with the dots arranged in 2 columns of 3 dots each or an 8 dot cell, with 2 columns of 4 dots each. Generally braille is presented in two ways to the user 1) static raised dot display (where actuators move up and down below the reading finger of the user) and 2) a lateral presentation of text to the user where there is a continuous slip between the reading finger and the surface of the dots. There are also the alternate methods of presenting braille to users where the users receive vibrations to indicate the position of dots in a braille cell. In these alternate modes of displaying braille as seen in [START_REF] Thomas | Alternate braille display designs: A review[END_REF] the standard 6 dot format is not adhered to with regards to the arrangement of dots and the spacing between the dots. These alternate methods seem to be effective in the presentation of short texts to the user. Fig. 1 shows various divisions of research in the area of braille displays based on the way the skin of the reading finger is stimulated. Commercially available refreshable braille readers are very expensive mainly because an actuator is needed for each dot of the braille cell, each braille cell consisting of 6 or 8 dots. Therefore a number of actuators would be required for a single line of Braille text. Various actuators such as Electro Active Polymers (EAP), Shape Memory Alloys (SMA), and piezo-electric actuators have been used in the research and development of braille readers as in [START_REF] Vidal-Verdu | Graphical tactile displays for visually-impaired people[END_REF]. But at present, most commercially available braille displays use piezoelectric actuators. To reduce the costs of braille readers, researchers have gone into making single cell readers where only one cell is presented at a time to the user.

Fig. 1. Various divisions of research in braille displays

Also due to the high costs of braille readers, many visually impaired users switch to accessing data from a computer via screen readers which are more affordable and easily available in developing countries. Our work lies in the area where there is a lateral presentation of braille text to the user i.e. the actuators stimulate the skin of the reading finger tangentially. The goal of our work is to test whether blind users are able to read braille words even when non-sensical letters pass under the reading finger. We are evaluating this feature through a proof of concept prototype. The remainder of the paper is organized into four sections. Section 2 looks specifically at several aspects of braille reading which have been studied and specifically braille technologies which involve lateral movement between the actuators and the reading finger. Section 3 looks at our experimental protocol and the results. Section 4 and 5 deal with discussions and conclusions respectively.

Background

Features of braille-reading

In [START_REF] Schiff | Tactual perception: a sourcebook[END_REF] Foulke conducted extensive studies to examine braille reading and explored the possibilities of improving the reading rate of braille readers. He was interested in the legibility of braille characters and words formed by them. Experiments were conducted to find how long it took to recognize a braille character and whether certain braille characters took longer to be identified than others. He also subjected visual readers to the same reading conditions as braille readers i.e. viewing one character at a time and concluded that the speed of visual readers and braille readers would be similar if both were subjected to reading braille and print under similar conditions. These results were supported by [START_REF] Legge | Measuring Braille reading speed with the MNREAD test[END_REF] who conducted similar tests. They also suggested the use of characters per second as an appropriate measure of braille reading speed as word length is variable.

In a comparative study of braille and letters, Loomis, in [START_REF] Loomis | On the tangibility of letters and braille[END_REF] studied the tangibility of letters and braille and suggested that braille dots were more perceptible than letters. However similar studies by Heller [START_REF] Heller | Tactual recognition of embossed Morse code, letters, and braille[END_REF], where braille, letters and the Morse code were compared, found that with unrestricted exploration, there was similar performance in the recognition of braille and letters. In more recent studies [START_REF] Russomanno | Refreshing Refreshable Braille Displays[END_REF], aspects of braille reading, such as the differences in static and sliding indentation to the finger reading braille were studied on 4 participants under different display and proprioceptive conditions. Their experimental design had two display types (static and sliding) and two proprioceptive conditions (proprioceptive and non-proprioceptive). The study suggested that the lack of sliding contact between the reading surface and the reading finger diminishes the accuracy of reading.

Latero-tactile Braille technologies

Progressive waves of deformations were fed tangentially to the skin of the reading finger by a device and this effect was studied on the ability of a user to read truncated braille characters. This was compared to reading the conventional braille medium [START_REF] Lévesque | Display of virtual braille dots by lateral skin deformation: feasibility study[END_REF].The design further emerged as the STRESS2 tactile transducer that has 10-by-6 contactors which deliver tangential forces to the skin [START_REF] Lévesque | Braille display by lateral skin deformation with the STReSS2 tactile transducer[END_REF]. Displaying complete 6 dot braille was explored using this device. However reading strings of disconnected letters was difficult though possible. Reading familiar words were faster and more accurate. Earlier designs which allowed for lateral deformation of the fingertip included the rotating wheel braille display [START_REF] Roberts | 49.2: Rotating-Wheel Braille Display for Continuous Refreshable Braille[END_REF][START_REF] Nobels | Development of a portable braille display using a fast prototyping platform for power electronics[END_REF].The rotating wheel design [START_REF] Roberts | 49.2: Rotating-Wheel Braille Display for Continuous Refreshable Braille[END_REF] used fewer actuators (3 actuators for 6 dot braille, 4 for 8 dot braille) in a compact volume having a drum with a small diameter. The pins would be set just before it entered into the reading area of the device which was under the users' primary reading finger. This device however occurred at constant speeds and did not accommodate reversals. Also, performance assessment of the device was not fully investigated with visually challenged users. Tactile Mice have been designed where both tactile and thermal feedback have been provided [START_REF] Yang | KAT II: Tactile display mouse for providing tactile and thermal feedback[END_REF].Users are able to distinguish material surface by getting temperature feedback. The tactile feedback is provided by 30 piezo-electric bimorphs. Other similar tactile -mice have been developed for research purposes. Earlier tape displays such as Grundwald's belt device [START_REF]Reading and writing machine using raised patterns[END_REF] had a bubbled tape loop into which protrusions could be punched by actuators.

Method

Apparatus

In our present work, we want to investigate whether a visually-impaired user can read words even though non-sensical letters pass under the reading finger. We have adopted a laterotactile presentation of text to the user in our study due to the reasons presented in [START_REF] Russomanno | Refreshing Refreshable Braille Displays[END_REF], [START_REF] Jones | Designing Effective Refreshable Braille Displays[END_REF], namely that single cell displays must involve sliding contact for more effective braille reading. The apparatus consists of a tactile display (braille embossed disc) mounted on the shaft of a stepper motor and the interfacing driving electronics (control system) which is placed in an enclosure as seen in Fig. 3. In this method of presentation, the reading finger is stationary while the text changes underneath it. The enclosure bears the weight of the hand resting on it while the reading finger is placed on the disc.

 Tactile Display

The embossed disc is 3D printed and made of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) plastic. It is an opaque thermoplastic and amorphous polymer. With a width, s, of 5mm assigned to each braille cell and Ө =28.8⁰, the radius of the disc was calculated is 20mm as in [START_REF] Thomas | Alternate braille display designs: A review[END_REF].

𝑠 = 𝑟× 𝜃 (1)
The disc has a width of 10 mm as in Fig. 2, and is comfortable for the users to place their reading finger on. It had 25 braille letters embossed around its circumference with a braille letter placed every 14.4⁰. The height of the braille dots were 0.9mm and the width was 1.4mm in accordance with the standard values [START_REF] Runyan | EAP actuators aid the quest for the 'Holy Braille' of tactile displays[END_REF]. As preliminary testing with the visually challenged user showed that the braille characters were too close to each other, the disc was modified with only alternate braille characters embossed i.e. a braille character was embossed every 28.8 ⁰(16 steps). As a result only 12 braille characters could be presented to the user. The results of testing with 12 braille characters are documented in our results. The disc is mounted on the motor shaft and rotates by different angles according to the letter pressed on the keyboard of the laptop. With a speed of 150 rpm, 400ms is the maximum time it will take to display character separated by a full 360⁰.We understand that the reading speed is limited by rotation speed of the motor. Choosing a motor with faster rpm, will increase the ability of the device to display characters faster. Also embossing characters closer to each other will reduce the delays between the appearances of letters.

Participants

Two visually challenged volunteers (both females) participated in the experiment (mean age 35 years, range 25-45).All of them had no other impairments and their right index finger was their primary reading finger. User 1 was adept in English braille with 40 years of experience while User 2 had just 5 years in learning English braille. The preliminary findings are based on data from these two participants.

3.3

Experimental settings

The prototype device we used for the study was placed on the table at the side of a laptop during testing. The participants were instructed to place their hand on the device with their primary reading finger placed on the disc as in Fig. 3.Since the users palm rested on the enclosure, the weight of the hand did not stop the disc as it rotated. The finger rested lightly on the disc as the enclosure bore most of the weight of the hand. In our technique of presenting words to the users, the display of words is character by character, via hyper terminal to the blind user by the experimenter. As the experimenter presses a key, the stepper motor rotates through a corresponding specific angle, bringing the letter right under the reading finger of the user, while non-sensical letters brush past the reading finger. The user reads the character just under their reading finger. The letter is held under the reading finger, till the next letter is sent via uart. If a character could not be understood, they were instructed to say 'Pass' so that the experimenter could send the next letter. The user was initially allowed to feel the device and the embossed braille disc. The reading finger that was placed over the disc could move over the embossed character both vertically and horizontally if the user felt the need to, otherwise it was held over the disc while the disc rotated below it. Three sets of 36 randomly assorted words (2-letter, 3-letter, 4-letter words) were presented to the user as Trial1, Trial2 and Trial3 in two sessions, Session1 and Session2. The accuracy of reading out words in a minute was recorded and the mean speed of the three trials (in cpscharacters per second) per session was noted. We specifically use character per second as metric of reading speed as words differ in length and a braille cell is a basic unit in reading braille [START_REF] Legge | Measuring Braille reading speed with the MNREAD test[END_REF]. Since the users are not native English speakers, we assessed their accuracy and speed on a printed braille sheet which had similar two, three and four lettered words. Both readers were asked to read from the experimental set-up in the same way they read from paper braille. The accuracy and speed on both paper braille and our apparatus was then compared. For both paper braille and in the experimental set up, their mean speeds of 3 trials in each session were noted.

Results

User 1 and User 2 differ in their proficiency of English .This is seen even as we compare their performance on paper Braille as in Table1. User 1 who is experienced with English had a noticeable decrease in speed when reading words in our experimental set up. Yet there was a slight increase in speed in the 2 nd session of testing as seen in Fig. 4. Verbal reports from User 1 suggested that if she spent more time adapting herself to reading in this manner, she would read faster. There was a minimal increase in speed for both users in session2.This suggests an increase in speed with practice. The accuracy of both users on paper braille and the experimental set up were similar. This indicates that reading using this technique is viable.

Discussion

The standard braille reading rates for skilled readers are approximately 125 words per minute equivalent to 7.5cps [START_REF] Legge | Measuring Braille reading speed with the MNREAD test[END_REF].Since our users are not native English speakers we assessed their paper braille reading speeds. A comparison of the results on paper and our apparatus indicate that even though other letters brush under the finger, reading is possible as the user reads the letter that finally stops under the reading finger. Also, in words such as 'L-O-O-K', the largest time delay, as seen in Fig. 6 would be between the appearance of the consecutive letter 'o' under the reading finger as the disc would need to rotate a full 360⁰ to come back to letter 'o' again.

Fig. 6. Time in milli-seconds between the appearances of letters.

Braille characters under the reading finger move in an anti-clockwise direction as that is the conventional way braille is read. Therefore the embossed disc rotates only in the counter clockwise direction beneath the reading finger. The embossed braille characters are arranged at random along the perimeter of the disc. We interspersed vowels and consonants as words are generally constituted by both of them. Therefore the number of steps between the letters depends on the arrangement of letters along the disc circumference. In this disc, consecutive embossed letters were 16 steps apart from each other. If we place them closer, yet with enough spacing for a visually-impaired user to be able to distinguish them with ease, the delay between the appearances of letters can be further decreased. The high speed of the electronics contributes to the minimum delay between the appearances of letters under the reading finger. The switching sequence of the stepper motor used had a minimum delay of 2ms. The motor speed is 150rpm.This is a limiting factor in the speed of rotation of the braille embossed disc. A motor with a higher speed will be able to present characters with even shorter delays. For presentation of braille characters in this method, we have used just one actuator as opposed to the use of many actuators (a minimum of six for a braille cell) as in other designs of braille readers. Even with the use of a single actuator in this method of presentation, the accuracy rates were between 98% and 100% for both users. Hence, we believe that further investigating this feature in reading braille with a larger sample size would help in the design of cost-effective braille readers.

Conclusion

We have shown in this preliminary study that it is possible for blind readers to read words even as non-sensical letters pass under their reading finger. The results noted in here are on testing with just two visually-challenged users, of which one was minimally proficient in English braille. A wider population of visually impaired people who are proficient in English must be tested. Also, this aspect of braille reading must be further investigated when the user has control over the presentation of characters. For this we plan to incorporate closed loop control of the motor where the user points to a character in an application and the disc rotates according to the position of the device as indicated by movement of a cursor that points to a letter on the screen. The disc needs to be redesigned to incorporate more characters.

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig.2. Modified 12 letter embossed disc (dimensions in mm)

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig.3. Experimental set-up

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Comparison of speeds between users on paper braille and the experimental set-up

Fig. 5 .

 5 Fig. 5. Comparison of accuracy between users on paper braille and the experimental set-up

Table 1 .

 1 Speed in cps for User1 and User2

		Paper	Session1	Session2
		Braille
	User1	2.6	0.51	0.59
	User2	0.36	0.37	0.38

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India for the financial support of this work (vide reference no.SR/WOS-A/ET/1000/2014 (G), under the Women Scientist Scheme). We are thankful to our volunteers, who so willingly gave their time for testing of the device. Thanks are due to Mr. Ravi Sivalingam for his assistance in the CAD drawings of the discs.

Appendix

Testing of the device with visually challenged users complied with the guidelines of the Institutional Ethical Committee for Studies on Human Subjects, VIT University (Ref. No. VIT/IECH/007/April 16, 2016).