[Blindtlk] From The Ny Times

[Chris Westbrook]

I totally agree Gary.  Although I do think we need to find a way to get the
cost of electronic braille down if we wish to keep Braille relevant.  I'd
love to have a braille display at home for leisure/news reading, but I can't
justify spending that kind of money and the state won't help me because I am
employed.  I can't imagine I am the only one.

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 10:28 AM, Gary Wunder <gwunder at earthlink.net> wrote:

> 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
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