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

[Beth]

Wow.  I admit to having been taught Braille as a child and my vision
teacher was wonderful, but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of
today's children are not taught that way.  Braille readers are
leaders, they say.
Beth

On 1/4/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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