[Ohio-talk] Braille glove

[Debra Baker]

David--Wow!  I am very glad that you will be a volunteer, and more importantly, a Braille reading role model for our kids in BELL shortly.  Your passionate reply to the Braille glove issue was inspiring.  Looking forward to getting to know you better soon.

Debbie Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Ohio-talk [mailto:ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of David Cohen via Ohio-talk
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2014 11:26 AM
To: NFB of Ohio Announcement and Discussion List
Subject: Re: [Ohio-talk] Braille glove

I am writing in response to the email regarding Haptic learning and Braille forwarded from Doctor Avrish Chopra.  I am not writing to discredit the Braille glove and do not want to express a sentiment of debate about its possible usefulness for others.  I only want to share my own personal experience and thoughts about Braille and the impact of it in my own individual life.

Technology is wonderful and makes many things accessible I agree.
However I carry in my mind and heart many blind people who did all of the same things we are doing today more or less without digital devices that express the act of learning as if it is a stressful and laborious task, something in life that must be done that comes with physical and emotional struggle like it is the time of puberty revisited again and again.  I read the email, thought of how I learned Braille at age 20 and recognized similarity in the suggested sentiment of difficulty that has never been separate from the act of learning Braille as far as my 25 year experience validates.  The doctor’s expressed opinion that learning Braille is not easy sounded like so many television and radio advertisements.

It is easier now to buy car insurance.  People it is now so much easier to travel at such and such airport using this airline.  It is easier to get through the checkout at Kroger.  People people listen to me it is so much easier to lose weight and we’re going totell you how to do this in 3 easy steps.  It is easier to file an insurance claim, easier to keep in contact with your friends, easier to work, cook dinner and even easier to fall asleep after a hard day of living such a difficult life.  It is even professed to be easier to receive Cancer treatment.  It is easier to open a checking account, what?  When was it ever difficult to sign one’s name?  It is easier to pay your bill, schedule a visit from a plumber and easier to meet people, and even easier to sue someone if you call this 800 number.  The advertisement for easier makes the world in which we live out to be a daily repetition of the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Learning Braille is not difficult.  Learning to live with ignorance about blindness, now that is difficult but whadda ya gonna do?

The late Doctor Jernigan and those who followed him had built-in tools that did not require assembly or batteries to engage the skills necessary to create their own futures.  The tools which they were in possession of they could not leave on the table at Starbucks and in truth never ever ran out of power or demanded upgrading.  In truth many of our blind predecessors did much more than any of us with much much less.  The proof of the successful blindpersons I admire and know personally is in their pudding if you will.  They are and were lawyers, school teachers, early Cobalt programmers with 3M, Honeywell and American Express and they learned and lived when easier was known simply as living and setting goals.

When I became blind at age 20 I was living with the certainty that all blind people read Braille, that I must now learn Braille because I am a blind person and did so.  I met the right people.  I took a lesson, purchased a McDuffy Reader, was shown a slate and a stylus and how to load it etc. and I had something to do to keep my brain feeding itself at a time when I desperately needed mental engagement.  Engaging the alternative techniques of blindness fed and strengthend the muscle of my brain in the same way that bench presses build strength in the arms and chest.

I believed into knowing and knew believingly that all blind people read Braille so therein I taught myself and learned Braille.  I only learned ipso facto that this was not the case and along with this very surprising fact came all of the whys and wherefores about difficulty, challenge and mental exhaustion that persists to this very day.

I’m not soapboxing for anyone but myself.  Braille helped me when I was 20 and years later proved time after time in several different ways to be beneficial outside of its obviously immediate use for gaining proficiency. Braille helped develop my sense of touch which I think is greatly understated as a useful tool again something much more special in its use beyond the immediately obvious, and the mental exercise I won’t even begin to detail and praise herein less this message expand into Steinbeckian proportion.

The email from the doctor states that this glove will allow the person to learn Braille and not be focused on the task.  What?  Will the glove also breathe for me, remember where I put my house keys etc.?
Braille is said in the email to not be easy.  Why can’t it just be, just simply be as it is?  Why must Braille be accepted as the 13th task of Hercules by people who do not have the hands on experience to know exactly what learning it truly is?  The blind people I’ve met in the largest assemblage of blind people in the world have never expressed the difficulty of learning Braille to me, such people only speak of their appreciation and gratitude for Braille and what it has given them.  People I meet who ask me about Braille and here my answer about learning Braille 99.9% of the time respond with, “Oh that must have been difficult.”  I have no answer for this statement because what I know from personal experience is rendered unbelievable and there is no amount of words that can penetrate this belief and only the knowledge I possess that I can read Braille, you can’t, and that it ain’t difficult or too challenging for the human mind exists within myself to know its truth.  I have to laugh because those who express this belief of inexperience are most often the same who park their cars and enter grocery stores, and 30 minutes later upon exiting the store have no recollection of where the car is in the parking lot.
Such a person walks aimlessly scanning lanes of parked cars without a single landmark of mental assistance denoted in their short-term memory despite the environment being comprised of so much useful information.  Does someone really want to engage the learning process in terms of easier?  No worries, once you find the car it has a GPS that will guide you back home I think to myself.

Small successes, 26 letters X amount of letters each day is what I did in 1990.  I had a great incentive to label all my music CDs in Braille which offered the learning process variety and immediate reward.  I was slowly learning how to identify, organize and develop a mental strength of recall.  As a sidenote, the language I can detail associated with learning not just Braille, but the alternative techniques of blindness in general mirror all of the perfunctory demands of employers found on career websites like organization, independent working and prioritization skills etc.  It’s true.

Another digression of relative experience pertaining to the act of learning is that I would today excitedly and eagerly engage blindness rehabilitation training again for the simple fun and experience of it in the same way people return to the cinema to see a movie repeatedly and return to amusement parks several times and I bet that there are others out there who feel this same way.  I would also return to guidedog school annually to feel again the excitement and witness first-hand the truly amazing that is enveloped in the simple and the ordinary.  I use a cane exclusively now and have done so for many years and routinely recall the first time I recognized with my ears how it was possible to cross a street and let the idling engines on my left that day direct me safely across.  This was only the beginning just as learning the first 10 Braille letters was the beginning.  Both skills have developed into tools I could not have imagined to be so important to me, skills that still amaze and feed my soul to this day.
And in truth there is probably more to come.

Engaging Braille the way I did, which was 95% independently using that wonderful learning tool called the McDuffy Reader was not easy and it was not difficult, it was just exactly like anything and everything else I’d ever engaged in my 20 years of life-learning that only asked me to take and utilize what was given me to provide for me in the same way a beaver uses its tail to live the life of a beaver.  Personally I believe that to look upon learning or to engage the act of learning in terms of made easier or disregarded as too difficult is to deny creation its gift to me. It is to me like complaining about the weather and simultaneously stating that each day of this life is a gift.

The glove is neat.  Maybe its something the COSI museum might like to display.  Easy and easier is for the Geico lizard, the helping hands of Allstate, the 20 minute workout and Wendy’s which now makes it easier to eat after midnight.  Reading Braille makes it possible to read surreptitiously in front of people you find infinitely boring.
Braille makes it possible for you to occupy yourself within the uncomfortable silence people in general feel inside an elevator with strangers.  Learning the Braille code makes it possible to make mental Braille short-form words and symbols into memorable words on telephone keypads thus enabling you to recall an important number you did not expect to be given.  The Braille code makes it possible to create street addresses into possible words and acronyms which impresses the hell out of people at parties and woos women.  And a Braille grocery list pulled from your pocket in the bread isle at Kroger has the power to stop the movement of strangers so they might attempt to observe and this is in my own experience the first step in engaging people in a world in which too much division exists.

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