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

Wed Jan 6 18:21:30 UTC 2010

Hi all,

In  my mind, it's not a question of which reading medium is better
than the other. It's a matter of options. Knowing two skills is always
better than knowing one, and in my opinion it really doesn't hurt a
young child to learn Braille. They may or may not use it all the time,
but it can't hurt and  very well could help them in a significant way.
If it's a given in  our society that sighted children will read and
write independently, why is this not a given for the blind?

Arielle

On 1/7/10, Darian Smith <dsmithnfb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Joseph,
>
>  With the advant of and advances in  digital technologies  would one
> not argue that people are  actually more likely to be employed because
> access to information is  better than it was even five years ago?
>   can it  be said that the blind who knnow braille are superior to the
> blind who arn't? if so, who makes this determination?
>   Respectfully,
>   Darian
>
>
> On 1/6/10, T. Joseph Carter <carter.tjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Darian,
>>
>> What it makes them is statistically far less likely to be employed,
>> for one thing.  That alone should convince parents and teachers the
>> importance of Braille education.
>>
>> Joseph
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 07:40:41PM -0800, Darian Smith wrote:
>>>I hope individuals don't mind my playing devil's advocate  focused
>>>upon the statement "braille readers are leaders".
>>>   What does this  make those who arn't very good braille readers,
>>>don't want to know, or  don't know braille?
>>>
>>> Do you feel the Organization  (the nfb) frowns upon  non-braille readers?
>>>  respectfullly,
>>>  Darian
>>>
>>>On 1/4/10, Kerri Kosten <kerrik2006 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
>>>>>> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
>>>>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
>>>>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
>>>>>> nabs-l:
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>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> nabs-l mailing list
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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>>--
>>>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
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>nabs-l mailing list
>>>nabs-l at nfbnet.org
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>>
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>
>
> --
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> nabs-l mailing list
> nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/nabs-l_nfbnet.org
> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
> nabs-l:
> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/nabs-l_nfbnet.org/nabs.president%40gmail.com
>

-- 
Arielle Silverman
President, National Association of Blind Students
Phone:  602-502-2255
Email:
nabs.president at gmail.com
Website:
www.nabslink.org