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<DIV><FONT size=2>This lengthy article was sent to me by our Orange County
Disability Services Coordinator. We had quite a discussion about it at our
Disability Advisory Board meeting. Most people ended up being pro-Braille, but
there were those who felt technology solved everything! I was the only blind
person participating in the discussion. I am totally on the pro-Braille side,
though I do understand there are sometimes other disabilities, such as diabetic
neuropathy and other challenges that might make learning Braille more difficult.
I admire those I know who were formerly sighted and tackled Braille and are
using it quite well today. Thought this would generate some good discussion.
</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2>Sherri</FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=Samme.Ripley@ocfl.net
href="mailto:Samme.Ripley@ocfl.net">Samme.Ripley@ocfl.net</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=flmom2006@gmail.com
href="mailto:flmom2006@gmail.com">flmom2006@gmail.com</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:43 AM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> FW: Listening to Braille - NYT article</DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV class=Section1>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Thought it would be
interesting to hear from you on the below article taken from the NY Times on
January 3, 2010.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Thanks,
Samme<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<DIV>
<DIV class=MsoNormal style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" align=center><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">
<HR tabIndex=-1 align=center width="100%" SIZE=2>
</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><B><FONT face=Tahoma size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">From:</SPAN></FONT></B><FONT
face=Tahoma size=2><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma"> <A
href="mailto:Reid_Jaffe@doh.state.fl.us">Reid_Jaffe@doh.state.fl.us</A>
[mailto:Reid_Jaffe@doh.state.fl.us] <BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:28
AM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> <BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> FW: Listening to Braille - NYT
article</SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">This NY Times piece was
sent by Cheri Hofmann. In case the link doesn't work, I'm providing you
the text:</SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">January 3,
2010<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV>
<H1><NYT_HEADLINE type=" " version="1.0"><B><FONT face=Arial color=blue
size=6><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 24pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Listening
to Braille <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></NYT_HEADLINE></H1>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"><NYT_BYLINE type=" "
version="1.0">By RACHEL
AVIV<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody>
<P><SPAN class=bold><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">AT 4
O’CLOCK</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"> 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, <A
title="In-depth reference and news articles about Blindness."
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/blindness/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">blindness</SPAN></FONT></A> was a
disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor
impairment.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Braille books are
expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick, oversize paper. The National
Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house in <st1:City
w:st="on">Boston</st1:City>, printed the <A
title="Recent and archival news about Harry Potter."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry_potter/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">Harry Potter</SPAN></FONT></A> series
on its <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Heidelberg</st1:place></st1:City> 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.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">“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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><SPAN class=bold><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">UNTIL THE
19TH</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"> <SPAN
class=bold>CENTURY</SPAN>, 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 <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:City>, 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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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 <A
title="In-depth reference and news articles about Mental status tests."
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">memory</SPAN></FONT></A>, and their
superior performance was caused, the authors suggested, by the extra processing
that took place in the visual regions of their brains.
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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 <A
title="In-depth reference and news articles about MRI."
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mri/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">M.R.I.</SPAN></FONT></A> 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.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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 <st1:place
w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">University</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName
w:st="on">Calgary</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>, 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”:<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><SPAN class=bold><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">OUR
DEFINITION</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"> 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
<st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Britain</st1:country-region>, are now thought to have lower Braille
literacy than those in developing ones, like <st1:country-region
w:st="on">Indonesia</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region
w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Botswana</st1:place></st1:country-region>, where
there are few alternatives to Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an
assistive-technology company in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place
w:st="on">Australia</st1:place></st1:country-region>, told me that he has heard
this described as “one of the advantages of being poor.”
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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 <A
title="More articles about Abraham Lincoln."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincoln/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">Abraham Lincoln</SPAN></FONT></A>. 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. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">While people like Laura
Sloate or the governor of <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New
York</st1:place></st1:State>, <A title="More articles about David A. Paterson."
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_a_paterson/index.html?inline=nyt-per"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">David A. Paterson</SPAN></FONT></A>,
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,
<st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Paterson</st1:place></st1:City>
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. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">When deaf people began
getting <A title="In-depth reference and news articles about Cochlear implants."
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/cochlear-implant/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"><FONT
color=#000066><SPAN style="COLOR: #000066">cochlear implants</SPAN></FONT></A>
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.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P><FONT face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">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 <SPAN class=italic>Scripta manent, verba
volant</SPAN>: What is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV><NYT_AUTHOR_ID>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<DIV class=MsoNormal style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" align=center><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">
<HR tabIndex=-1 align=center width="100%" SIZE=2>
</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 12pt"><B><FONT face=Tahoma size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma">From:</SPAN></FONT></B><FONT
face=Tahoma size=2><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma"> Cheri
Hofmann [mailto:adaforyou@bellsouth.net] <BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Wednesday, January 13, 2010 6:06
PM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> Alicia; Brett R.; Brett
Robinson; Cheri H.; Danny B.; debbie; Don R.; Cherry, Frank; Frank Cherry;
George; Jackie G.; Rita; Sharon; Sherri<BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Cc:</SPAN></B> Jaffe, Reid; Steve Howells; 'Jennifer
Kent-Walsh'; 'Kelli Bloom'; nmashberg@tgh.org; andre howard; Dahlia
Challenger<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Listening
to Braille - NYT article</SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">This article was so interesting that
I had to share it. <FONT color=black><SPAN
style="COLOR: black"> (could be time sensitive)
Cheri</SPAN></FONT></SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Listening to
Braille</SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html"><FONT
face=Arial><SPAN
style="FONT-FAMILY: Arial">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html</SPAN></FONT></A><o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face=Arial size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Source: New York
Times</SPAN></FONT><o:p></o:p></P>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><o:p> </o:p></SPAN></FONT></P></DIV>
<DIV class=MsoNormal style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" align=center><FONT
face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">
<HR align=center width="100%" SIZE=2>
</SPAN></FONT></DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><BR></SPAN></FONT><B><I><FONT face=Arial size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">For
up-to-date information about H1N1 Swine Flu visit</SPAN></FONT></I></B> <FONT
face=Arial color=blue size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: blue; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"><A
href="http://www.myflusafety.com">http://www.myflusafety.com</A></SPAN></FONT><B><I><FONT
face=Arial size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">
or call 877 352 3581</SPAN></FONT></I></B> <o:p></o:p></P></DIV>
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