[Blindtlk] From The Ny Times

[Gary Wunder]

A most interesting article. In conveys a lot in its brevity but draws some 
conclusions I don't. Because I am a proficient braille reader, I don't see 
audio and braille at war in my life. I use audio extensively - it's easier 
to fall asleep at night to a spare time book with audio. It's easier to take 
a leisurely bath reading with audio VS Braille, but it's not easier to write 
a computer program, edit a document, and learn the spelling of words. I knew 
about Enron long before I saw it in Braille and realized how it was spelled. 
What about its boss - is that Kenneth Lay or is his last name spelled 
differently.

I don't want to act or feel superior just because I know Braille. What I do 
want is to bring it to anyone who wants and can benefit from it. In a world 
where there is so much more print than there is accessible material, I want 
to learn and teach anything which gives access to more information.

Gary


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "james sofka" <jamessofka at att.net>
To: "NFBnet Blind Talk Mailing List" <blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 3:26 PM
Subject: [Blindtlk] From The Ny Times


> Hi, all.
> For your information.
> Jim Sofka.
> With New Technologies, Do Blind People Lose More Than They Gain? - 
> NYTimes.com
>
> The New York Times
>
> Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By ad.220970/ch_120x60_anim_globes
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> January 3, 2010
>
> Listening to Braille
>
> By RACHEL AVIV
>
> AT 4 O'CLOCK each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She 
> calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, 
> and she
> listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is nearly 
> twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The Financial 
> Times
> to her while she uses her computer's text-to-speech system to play The 
> Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to the 
> magazine.
> The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Sloate 
> has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring over 
> the
> news and the economic reports for several hours every morning, she does 
> not use Braille. "Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my 
> finger to
> my brain," she says. As a child she learned how the letters of the 
> alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She doesn't 
> think of a
> comma in terms of its written form but rather as "a stop on the way before 
> continuing." This, she says, is the future of reading for the blind. 
> "Literacy
> evolves," she told me. "When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we 
> had nothing else. We didn't even have radio. At that time,
> blindness
> was a disability. Now it's just a minor, minor impairment."
>
> A few decades ago, commentators predicted that the electronic age would 
> create a postliterate generation as new forms of media eclipsed the 
> written word.
> Marshall McLuhan claimed that Western culture would return to the "tribal 
> and oral pattern." But the decline of written language has become a 
> reality for
> only the blind. Although Sloate does regret not spending more time 
> learning to spell in her youth - she writes by dictation - she says she 
> thinks that
> using Braille would have only isolated her from her sighted peers. "It's 
> an arcane means of communication, which for the most part should be 
> abolished,"
> she told me. "It's just not needed today."
>
> Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, 
> oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing 
> house in Boston,
> printed the
> Harry Potter
> series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the final product was 56 volumes, each 
> nearly a foot tall. Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 
> and there's
> a shortage of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired 
> students often read using MP3 players, audiobooks and 
> computer-screen-reading software.
>
> A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an 
> advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 
> 1.3 million
> legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind 
> children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 
> 10,
> according to the report. The figures are controversial because there is 
> debate about when a child with residual vision has "too much sight" for 
> Braille
> and because the causes of blindness have changed over the decades - in 
> recent years more blind children have multiple disabilities, because of 
> premature
> births. It is clear, though, that Braille literacy has been waning for 
> some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has 
> inspired
> a fervent movement to change the way blind people read. "What we're 
> finding are students who are very smart, very verbally able - and 
> illiterate," Jim
> Marks, a board member for the past five years of the Association on Higher 
> Education and Disability, told me. "We stopped teaching our nation's blind 
> children
> how to read and write. We put a tape player, then a computer, on their 
> desks. Now their writing is phonetic and butchered. They never got to 
> learn the
> beauty and shape and structure of language."
>
> For much of the past century, blind children attended residential 
> institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today, 
> visually impaired
> children can be well versed in literature without knowing how to read; 
> computer-screen-reading software will even break down each word and read 
> the individual
> letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to define, even for 
> educators.
>
> "If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind 
> is limited," Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access 
> Journal, told
> me. "You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can't feel or 
> see the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone." Like many Braille 
> readers,
> Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of Braille 
> cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices are 
> still extremely
> costly and not yet widely used. Shandrow views the decline in Braille 
> literacy as a sign of regression, not progress: "This is like going back 
> to the 1400s,
> before Gutenberg's printing press came on the scene," he said. "Only the 
> scholars and monks knew how to read and write. And then there were the 
> illiterate
> masses, the peasants."
>
> UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY, blind people were confined to an oral culture. 
> Some tried to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or 
> outlined in felt
> with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a 
> student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a 
> cipher
> language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army 
> officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark. Braille modified the 
> code so that
> it could be read more efficiently - each letter or punctuation symbol is 
> represented by a pattern of one to six dots on a matrix of three rows and 
> two
> columns - and added abbreviations for commonly used words like 
> "knowledge," "people" and "Lord." Endowed with a reliable method of 
> written communication
> for the first time in history, blind people had a significant rise in 
> social status, and Louis Braille was embraced as a kind of liberator and 
> spiritual
> savior. With his "godlike courage," Helen Keller wrote, Braille built a 
> "firm stairway for millions of sense-crippled human beings to climb from 
> hopeless
> darkness to the Mind Eternal."
>
> At the time, blindness was viewed not just as the absence of sight but 
> also as a condition that created a separate kind of species, more innocent 
> and malleable,
> not fully formed. Some scholars said that blind people spoke a different 
> sort of language, disconnected from visual experience. In his 1933 book, 
> "The
> Blind in School and Society," the psychologist Thomas Cutsforth, who lost 
> his sight at age 11, warned that students who were too rapidly assimilated 
> into
> the sighted world would become lost in "verbal unreality." At some 
> residential schools, teachers avoided words that referenced color or light 
> because,
> they said, students might stretch the meanings beyond sense. These 
> theories have since been discredited, and studies have shown that blind 
> children as
> young as 4 understand the difference in meaning between words like "look," 
> "touch" and "see." And yet Cutsforth was not entirely misguided in his 
> argument
> that sensory deprivation restructures the mind. In the 1990s, a series of 
> brain-imaging studies revealed that the visual cortices of the blind are 
> not
> rendered useless, as previously assumed. When test subjects swept their 
> fingers over a line of Braille, they showed intense activation in the 
> parts of
> the brain that typically process visual input.
>
> These imaging studies have been cited by some educators as proof that 
> Braille is essential for blind children's cognitive development, as the 
> visual cortex
> takes more than 20 percent of the brain. Given the brain's plasticity, it 
> is difficult to make the argument that one kind of reading - whether the 
> information
> is absorbed by ear, finger or retina - is inherently better than another, 
> at least with regard to cognitive function. The architecture of the brain 
> is
> not fixed, and without images to process, the visual cortex can reorganize 
> for new functions. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience found that blind 
> subjects
> consistently surpassed sighted ones on tests of verbal
> memory,
> and their superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the 
> extra processing that took place in the visual regions of their brains.
>
> Learning to read is so entwined in the normal course of child development 
> that it is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print 
> literacy.
> But humans have been reading for fewer than 6,000 years (and literacy has 
> been widespread for no more than a century and a half). The activity of 
> reading
> itself alters the anatomy of the brain. In a report released in 2009 in 
> the journal Nature, the neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras studies illiterate 
> former
> guerrillas in Colombia who, after years of combat, had abandoned their 
> weapons, left the jungle and rejoined civilization. Carreiras compares 20 
> adults
> who had recently completed a literacy program with 22 people who had not 
> yet begun it. In
> M.R.I.
> scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more gray matter 
> in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing, and more 
> white
> matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres. 
> Deficiencies in these regions were previously observed in dyslexics, and 
> the study
> suggests that those brain patterns weren't the cause of their illiteracy, 
> as had been hypothesized, but a result.
>
> There is no doubt that literacy changes brain circuitry, but how this 
> reorganization affects our capacity for language is still a matter of 
> debate. In moving
> from written to spoken language, the greatest consequences for blind 
> people may not be cognitive but cultural - a loss much harder to avoid. In 
> one of
> the few studies of blind people's prose, Doug Brent, a professor of 
> communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a 
> teacher of
> visually impaired students, analyzed stories by students who didn't use 
> Braille but rather composed on a regular keyboard and edited by listening 
> to their
> words played aloud. One 16-year-old wrote a fictional story about a 
> character named Mark who had "sleep bombs":
>
> He looked in the house windo that was his da windo his dad was walking 
> around with a mask on he took it off he opend the windo and fell on his 
> bed sleeping
> mark took two bombs and tosed them in the windo the popt his dad lept up 
> but before he could grab the mask it explodedhe fell down asleep.
>
> In describing this story and others like it, the Brents invoked the 
> literary scholar Walter Ong, who argued that members of literate societies 
> think differently
> than members of oral societies. The act of writing, Ong said - the ability 
> to revisit your ideas and, in the process, refine them - transformed the 
> shape
> of thought. The Brents characterized the writing of many audio-only 
> readers as disorganized, "as if all of their ideas are crammed into a 
> container, shaken
> and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table." The 
> beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging 
> in the
> midst of another with a kind of breathless energy. The authors concluded, 
> "It just doesn't seem to reflect the qualities of organized sequence and 
> complex
> thought that we value in a literate society."
>
> OUR DEFINITION of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for 
> reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind 
> people makes
> the prospect of change particularly fraught. Since the 1820s, when Louis 
> Braille invented his writing system - so that blind people would no longer 
> be
> "despised or patronized by condescending sighted people," as he put it - 
> there has always been, among blind people, a political and even moral 
> dimension
> to learning to read. Braille is viewed by many as a mark of independence, 
> a sign that blind people have moved away from an oral culture seen as 
> primitive
> and isolating. In recent years, however, this narrative has been 
> complicated. Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the U.S. and 
> Britain, are now
> thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing ones, like 
> Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim 
> Connell,
> the managing director of an assistive-technology company in Australia, 
> told me that he has heard this described as "one of the advantages of 
> being poor."
>
>
> Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been 
> transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness 
> that it has assumed
> a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual vision and still try 
> to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an inch or two from 
> their
> faces - are generally frowned upon by the National Federation of the 
> Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil rights movement for 
> the blind.
> Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille to
> Abraham Lincoln.
> At the annual convention for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott 
> last July, I heard the mantra "listening is not literacy" repeated 
> everywhere,
> from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among middle-school 
> girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention featured children 
> who don't
> know what a paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that "happily 
> ever after" is made up of three separate words.
>
> Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice 
> president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of 
> the Rehabilitation
> Services Administration under President Clinton and relies primarily on 
> audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his lack of reading 
> skills. "I
> am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two months ago that I 
> realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than 'descent,' to 
> lower something,"
> he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate. People say, 'Oh, no, you're 
> not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not embarrassed to admit it."
>
> While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York,
> David A. Paterson,
> who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the help of 
> Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot afford. 
> Like Sloate,
> Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members select pertinent 
> newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice mail every 
> morning. (He
> calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as a child he was 
> "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that I'm not 
> really supposed
> to be blind.") Among people with fewer resources, Braille-readers tend to 
> form the blind elite, in part because it is more plausible for a blind 
> person
> to find work doing intellectual rather than manual labor.
>
> A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those 
> who learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be 
> employed as
> those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited 
> with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were sometimes 
> made
> to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from 
> the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using 
> text-to-speech
> software, told me. "If we could live in our own little Braille world, then 
> that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual world."
>
> When deaf people began getting
> cochlear implants
> in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt betrayed. The new 
> technology pushed people to think of the disability in a new way - as an 
> identity
> and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of many disabilities, 
> lifting the burdens but also complicating people's sense of what is 
> physically natural,
> because bodies can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle Silverman, a 
> graduate student at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me 
> that
> if she had the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. 
> Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes 
> photographs of
> text and then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision 
> like that, as "just another piece of technology."
>
> The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading, 
> with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you are viewed as 
> ignorant
> or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your ability 
> to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were designed to 
> function
> as much as possible like print books. But now the computer has essentially 
> done away with the limits of form, because information, once it has been 
> digitized,
> can be conveyed through sound or touch. For sighted people, the transition 
> from print to digital text has been relatively subtle, but for many blind 
> people
> the shift to computerized speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. 
> In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recited 
> to
> me various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: 
> What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
>
> Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with 
> the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times.
>
> Copyright 2009
> The New York Times Company
> list of 10 items
> Privacy Policy
> Terms of Service
> Search
> Corrections
> RSS
> First Look
> Help
> Contact Us
> Work for Us
> Site Map
> list end
> _______________________________________________
> blindtlk mailing list
> blindtlk at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindtlk_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for 
> blindtlk:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindtlk_nfbnet.org/gwunder%40earthlink.net
>