[nfbwatlk] Listening to Braille, New York Times Magazine, December 30 2009

[Mike Freeman]

Mary Elen:

It's relatively late so I won't say much except that I agree with your 
anguish at the loss of well-composed written communication, be it on paper 
or via the computer. Frankly, I approach even an email message as a 
mini-essay; would that others did likewise.

On another topic, I believe that trying to simplify braille isn't necessary; 
in my experience, most of the resistance to learning braille has more to do 
with the resistance to viewing oneself as blind than it does to any supposed 
difficulty with braille. Moreover, let's be honest: more and more people 
these days are lazy readers and wish to be spoon-fed. Frankly, I believe 
that reading should be *mor* challenging not less so. But then you're 
talking to someone who wanted calculus on the Amateur Extra ham radio 
license exam. (grin)

Mike

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary Ellen" <gabias at telus.net>
To: "'NFB of Washington Talk Mailing List'" <nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 8:37 PM
Subject: Re: [nfbwatlk] Listening to Braille, New York Times 
Magazine,December 30 2009


> What a complex mixture of truth and misconceptions! I found the article
> extremely interesting, though not very well organized. It is unfortunate,
> though, that Laura Sloate received the most prominent attention. The 
> title,
> too, was unfortunate.
> It is sad that a number of people regard our vociferous championing of
> Braille as criticism of those blind people who don't use it. I genuinely
> believe such a response is a mischaracterization of our position. However, 
> I
> can understand how a blind person without good Braille skills could feel
> intimidated by what we say.
> It is interesting to me that teachers of sighted children are bemoaning 
> the
> declining number of students who regularly read for pleasure. They also
> decry the semiliterate nature of writing involved in instant messaging and
> social networking. Clearly our entire society is undergoing a sea change 
> in
> the way we share information.
> Although digital storage makes it possible to retain and circulate oral 
> and
> visual information worldwide quickly (thereby eliminating one of the
> drawbacks of oral history and communication), no thinking person can deny
> that the written word offers power and clarity not usually found in the
> spoken word.
> Digitization is changing the world for everyone, blind people perhaps most
> of all. An inexpensive refreshable Braille display larger than a single 
> line
> would make a world of difference to those of us who love Braille. I
> recognize this is somewhat of a Holy Grail, longed for but still in the
> realm of dreams. I also believe some simplification of contracted Braille
> along the lines suggested by Jerry Whittle makes sense in order to 
> simplify
> the learning process for new Braille students. Those of us who are fluent
> Braille readers could adjust to uncontracted Braille without much loss of
> reading speed if doing so would make it more likely that a greater number 
> of
> people would use Braille. After all, saving space was one of the main
> reasons for the development of contractions in the first place.  If
> paperless Braille were an affordable possibility, that reason for
> contractions would disappear.
> These are random thoughts. I'd be interested in hearing other 
> perspectives.
>
> Mary Ellen
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nfbwatlk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Nightingale, Noel
> Sent: January 4, 2010 9:37 AM
> To: 'nfbwatlk at nfbnet.org'
> Subject: [nfbwatlk] Listening to Braille, New York Times Magazine,December
> 30 2009
>
>
>
> Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?emc=eta1
>
> Text:
> Listening to Braille
> Photographs by Tom Schierlitz
> 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 Hig  her 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 ser  ies 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 obser  ved 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 exploded he 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 Austra  lia, 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.
>
>
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