[Ccb-alumni] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one in town?

[Darian Smith]

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


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