[Cabs-talk] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one intown?

Tue Jan 5 00:27:11 UTC 2010

A friend showed me this article a couple days ago and I was wanting to write a response.  

Someone really should write something to it.  I don't get the impression that it really does much justice to the pro braille view, though I wasn't sure of my interpretation but after reading your comments maybe it wasn't that far off.

Justin Harford 
On Jan 4, 2010, at 3:43 PM, Angela Fowler wrote:

> Darien,
> 	Thank you for posting this very interesting and provocative article.
> I too look forward to hearing what others have to say about it.  
> Let me just make a few points here. I learned Braille as a child, but it
> quickly was supplanted by technology as my primary method of accessing
> information. This has lead to some consequences which I believe hamper my
> productivity. I'm a good writer, but a horrible speller, and homonyms, such
> as decent and descent... I get them wrong all the time. Often it takes me
> longer to spell check an email than it does to write it. "A victim of the
> digital age," is what I call it, and while I wouldn't give up the
> technology, I wish I'd kept my Braille skills up.
> 	Contrary to what the investment manager who lead off the article
> would have us believe, Braille is the most efficient way of doing many
> things. It's a God send when making a speech in which you need an outline.
> I've chaired many a meeting, trying to listen to the meeting and the agenda
> at the same time and thought "Man I wish I had this in Braille. This is not
> to mention, referring to outlines while writing essays, directly quoting
> sources, (goes back to this hearing two things at once thing), I could go on
> and on. I guess the best way to put it is this: Technology gives me access
> to information, Braille allows me to use it in the most efficient way
> possible. 
> 	Now, I would like to take issue with something which was stated
> toward the bottom of the article. Here I am quoting the article directly. 
> 
> 	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.
> 
> 	This is at best sloppy writing, and at worst a deliberate
> misrepresentation of our response to those folks who choose to continue
> reading print, either because they are unable at this time to seek
> instruction in Braille, or they have not come to terms with their blindness
> yet. We seek to make them comfortable with the idea of Braille, not frown
> upon then for not using it. We seek not to treat them as outcasts, butt to
> welcome them with open arms and show them that liberating skill, Braille,
> that we ourselves are so fortunate to have found. If we frown upon anything,
> it is an educational system which refuses to teach Braille, an education
> system of which those still-struggling print readers are truly victims. 
> 	Well, that's my two cents... For now anyway. Look forward to hearing
> everyone else's response to this interesting article. 
> Angela
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cabs-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:cabs-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Darian Smith
> Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 2:59 PM
> To: Colorado Center for the Blind mailing list; List for NABS State
> Presidents; National Association of Blind Students mailing list
> Subject: [Cabs-talk] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one
> intown?
> 
> This
> Listening to Braille
> 
> By RACHEL AVIV
> 
> Published: December 30, 2009
> 
> 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.
> 
> --
> The National Federation of the Blind has launched a nationwide teacher
> recruitment campaign to help attract energetic and passionate individuals
> into the field of blindness education, and we need your
> help!   To Get Involved  go to:
> www.TeachBlindStudents.org
> 
> 
> "And if you will join me in this improbable quest, if you feel destiny
> calling, and see as I see, a future of endless possibility stretching
> before us;
> if you sense, as I sense, that the time is now to shake off our
> slumber, and slough off our fear, and make good on the debt we owe
> past and future generations,
> then I'm ready to take up the cause, and march with you, and work with
> you. Together, starting today, let us finish the work that needs to be
> done, and
> usher in a new birth of freedom on this Earth."- Baraq Obama
> 
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