[Nfbf-l] Fw: Listening to Braille - NYT article

[Kirk]

So agreed! KH
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sherri" <flmom2006 at gmail.com>
To: "NFB of Florida Listserv" <nfbf-l at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 7:21 PM
Subject: Re: [Nfbf-l] Fw: Listening to Braille - NYT article


I totally agree with your opinion Sherrill. The thing is, whether it be
travel or reading or any other task we as blind people learn, we need to
have choices. I still contend, however, that a blind child not taught
Braille really does not learn much about sentence structure, spelling,
grammar, etc.

Sherri
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sherrill O'Brien" <sherrill.obrien at verizon.net>
To: "NFB of Florida Listserv" <nfbf-l at nfbnet.org>; "NFB Talk Mailing List"
<nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>; "NFB of Florida parents" <fopbc at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 9:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Nfbf-l] Fw: Listening to Braille - NYT article


> Hi Sherri and all,
>
> The article Sherri sent was even part of this week's Syndicated Columnists
> Weekly, a wonderful little magazine published by National Braille Press.
> I
> still can't figure out the strange title of the article.  I also wish
> educators of blind children, parents and blind people themselves would
> stop
> harboring these negative attitudes about Braille and passing them on to
> blind children and adults.  As a passionate Braille advocate, I have
> always
> understood the crucial role computers and text to speech software play in
> our lives.  Isn't there room for both?  It's back to the old tool box
> analogy.  A blind person's tool box should be overflowing with tools which
> are appropriate for various tasks we want or need to do.  I am so grateful
> I
> can choose which tool to use.
>
> I realize there are children today with multiple challenges, for whom
> Braille is very difficult.  But even these children can often learn the
> alphabet and use Braille for simple but meaningful tasks.  I hope all of
> us
> in the NFBf will always remember the importance of telling others about
> continuing to fill their tool box with things which will enrich their
> lives.
> It's sad that the obviously talented blind woman mentioned at the
> beginning
> of this article sends the unfortunate message to the whole world that
> Braille should be abolished.  How foolish and thoughtless.  Okay, I'll put
> my soap box away, but will sure keep my tool box ever at the ready!
>
> Thanks, Sherri, for posting this article.
>
> Sherrill
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbf-l-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbf-l-bounces at nfbnet.org]On
> Behalf Of TaraPrakash
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 8:48 AM
> To: NFB of Florida Listserv; NFB Talk Mailing List; NFB of Florida
> parents
> Subject: Re: [Nfbf-l] Fw: Listening to Braille - NYT article
>
>
> Hello Sherri and all.
>
> I spent most of my happening years in India at a time when computers were
> not much in vogue. I taught 4 of my women friends braille and 3 of them
> used
> to write letters to me and receive from me in Braille. In the society
> where
> parental control limits interaction between boys and girls to zero to
> minimum, their learning braille and corresponding with me was a blessing.
>
> Now we don't have to learn Braille to write letters. But for brief
> personal
> notes, Braille is very handy. I read Braille magazines when listening to
> the
> news, which is most of the time predictable. While in the flights, braille
> magazines keep me entertained when they allow no electronics. In the
> hotels,
> other facilities  and elevators, Braille helps me big time.
>
> Braille has its virtues but so has text to speech technology. We can't
> ignore either of them.
>
> Regards
>
> Tara
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Sherri" <flmom2006 at gmail.com>
> To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>; "nfbf-l"
> <nfbf-l at nfbnet.org>; "NFB of Florida parents" <fopbc at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Friday, January 15, 2010 1:13 AM
> Subject: [Nfbf-l] Fw: Listening to Braille - NYT article
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>> Sherri
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Samme.Ripley at ocfl.net
>> To: flmom2006 at gmail.com
>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:43 AM
>> Subject: FW: Listening to Braille - NYT article
>>
>>
>> Thought it would be interesting to hear from you on the below article
>> taken from the NY Times on January 3, 2010.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks, Samme
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
>>
>> From: Reid_Jaffe at doh.state.fl.us [mailto:Reid_Jaffe at doh.state.fl.us]
>> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 2010 8:28 AM
>> To:
>> Subject: FW: Listening to Braille - NYT article
>>
>>
>>
>> This NY Times piece was sent by Cheri Hofmann.  In case the link doesn't
>> work, I'm providing you the text:
>>
>>
>>
>> January 3, 2010
>>
>> Listening to Braille
>> By RACHEL AVIV
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
>>
>> From: Cheri Hofmann [mailto:adaforyou at bellsouth.net]
>> Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 6:06 PM
>> To: Alicia; Brett R.; Brett Robinson; Cheri H.; Danny B.; debbie; Don R.;
>> Cherry, Frank; Frank Cherry; George; Jackie G.; Rita; Sharon; Sherri
>> Cc: Jaffe, Reid; Steve Howells; 'Jennifer Kent-Walsh'; 'Kelli Bloom';
>> nmashberg at tgh.org; andre howard; Dahlia Challenger
>> Subject: Listening to Braille - NYT article
>>
>> This article was so interesting that I had to share it.   (could be time
>> sensitive)  Cheri
>>
>>
>>
>> Listening to Braille
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html
>>
>> Source: New York Times
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
>>
>>
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