[Blindtlk] From The Ny Times

[Gary Wunder]

Yes, braille at home would be tremendous but at $4,000 it is way up hill.

Gary


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Westbrook" <westbchris at gmail.com>
To: "Gary Wunder" <gwunder at earthlink.net>; "Blind Talk Mailing List" 
<blindtlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 11:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Blindtlk] From The Ny Times


>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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