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

Tue Jan 5 05:13:33 UTC 2010

I don't use braille much my self but I will take my packmate braille display 
hook it to my labtop and use it to study and or when I have to present a 
paper in class.
Rania,
"For everyone who thought I couldn't do it.
For everyone who thought I shouldn't do it.
For everyone who said, 'It's impossible."
See you at the finish line."
~Christopher Reeve

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Kerri Kosten" <kerrik2006 at gmail.com>
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 9:44 PM
Subject: Re: [nabs-l] Braille Vs Technology: is there room for only one 
intown?

Hi:

Just thought I'd share my opinions for what it's worth.

I was taught braille, and am very good at reading it.
However, I admit with devices like the Victor Reader Stream, I really
don't read in braille much. I have a Pacmate notetaker with a braille
display, so I could and probably should download more books and read
them digitally, but just listening to a book on the tiny stream is
much easier than lugging around a note taker and reading on a braille
display.
So, I admit even as a great braille reader I don't use braille as much
as I should.

I do use it at my work though, for when I write previews I take my
notes in braille and that helps tremendously...so it definitely has
it's uses and children should definitely be taught it.

Braille readers are leaders!

Kerri+

On 1/4/10, Beth <thebluesisloose at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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