[Perform-talk] Braille in my life

Gary Kammerer kristianigee at gmail.com
Thu Jan 14 14:19:39 UTC 2010


On 1/13/10, perform-talk-request at nfbnet.org
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking out	against
>       Braille (Donna Hill)
>    2. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
>       outagainst Braille (Sarah alawami)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:32:37 -0500
> From: Donna Hill <penatwork at epix.net>
> To: nfbp-talk at yahoogroups.com, 	NFBnet Writer's Division Mailing List
> 	<stylist at nfbnet.org>,	Performing Arts Division list
> 	<perform-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Subject: [Perform-talk] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
> 	speaking out	against Braille
> Message-ID: <4B4CEA75.5040902 at epix.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> The following article was in the NY Times Magazine, Jan. 3, 2010. I'm
> interested in your opinions.
> Donna Hill
>
> ***
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/blindness/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry_potter/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> 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.
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mri/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincoln/index.html?inline=nyt-per>.
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_a_paterson/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/cochlear-implant/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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.
>
>
> --
> Read my articles on American Chronicle:
> http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3885
>
> Follow me on Twitter:
> www.twitter.com/dewhill
>
> Join Me on LinkedIn:
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/dwh99
>
> Or,  FaceBook:
> http://www.facebook.com/donna.w.hill.
>
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> http://cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill
>
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>
> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
> www.padnfb.org
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:21:44 -0800
> From: "Sarah alawami" <marrie12 at gmail.com>
> To: "'Performing Arts Division list'" <perform-talk at nfbnet.org>
> Subject: Re: [Perform-talk] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
> 	speaking	outagainst Braille
> Message-ID: <09861143BA6E468D933981CAC00F2E66 at sarahcomp>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="us-ascii"
>
> I thint that will tur off more people when t comes to braille. Yes I use a
> screen reader but I do read braille music if I can get it in time and that
> helps me a great deal. I say boo to that article!
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: perform-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org
> [mailto:perform-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Donna Hill
> Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 1:33 PM
> To: nfbp-talk at yahoogroups.com; NFBnet Writer's Division Mailing List;
> Performing Arts Division list
> Subject: [Perform-talk] NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
> outagainst Braille
>
> The following article was in the NY Times Magazine, Jan. 3, 2010. I'm
> interested in your opinions.
> Donna Hill
>
> ***
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/blindness/overview.html?in
> line=nyt-classifier>
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/complete_coverage/harry
> _potter/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mental-status-tests/overview.h
> tml?inline=nyt-classifier>,
> 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.
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/test/mri/overview.html?inline=nyt-c
> lassifier>
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/abraham_lincol
> n/index.html?inline=nyt-per>.
> 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
> <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/david_a_paters
> on/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
> 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
> <http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/specialtopic/cochlear-implant/overv
> iew.html?inline=nyt-classifier>
> 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.
>
>
> --
> Read my articles on American Chronicle:
> http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3885
>
> Follow me on Twitter:
> www.twitter.com/dewhill
>
> Join Me on LinkedIn:
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/dwh99
>
> Or,  FaceBook:
> http://www.facebook.com/donna.w.hill.
>
> Hear clips from "The Last Straw" at:
> http://cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill
>
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> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
> www.padnfb.org
>
>
>
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> End of Perform-talk Digest, Vol 38, Issue 7
> *******************************************
>
The lady who has printed this article does indeed have some strong
arguments. However, Braille has been my life since I was three years
old. I read the Bible in Braille. Most of my leisurely reading I do is
in Braille. When I am composing new songs as amusician, I use Braille.
When I write essays, I don't necessarily have time to go back to the
beginning and have JAWS read me everything I've written so far.
Reading Braille is the key; it is irreplaceable. Learning how to spell
and phonix can only be done through writingit out. Frankly, I would
not prefer dictating lyrics to songs to another person, for only I
know how my music can flow. Then, how will I read it? How will I know
what they wrote? I prefer independence. I prefer Braille... There is
so much more to say, but I'll leave it here for now.
Gary Kammerer
Social Networking Outreach Manager, Performing Arts Division




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