[stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker speakingoutagainst Braille

[Judith Bron]

Excellent article!  It points out a few things.  Did you ever notice that 
the sighted world defines and controls the availability of what blind people 
need?  Is their impression of a blind person using Braille, a deaf person 
with a hearing aid or a paraplegic in a wheelchair their conclusion based on 
impartial studies or a person's definition of their own identity?  An 
interesting thought and probably a great subject for an article.  Judith
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Barbara Hammel" <poetlori8 at msn.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 12:48 AM
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker 
speakingoutagainst Braille


>I wonder what this person would think if we told her that inner city 
>teachers and reservation teachers cost too much money so we shouldn't teach 
>the mostly black and native American populations?  Once upon a time they 
>couldn't read or write either and look how they lived.  If we stop making 
>the blind literate, who will be the next group to make illiterate? 
>Illiterate masses equals total control by those who wield the power.
> Sure, she may get by in this fashion and it may work for her, but don't 
> subject the rest of us to that fate.  Some of us are auditory learners and 
> some of us are visual (tactile) learners.  Even in the sighted population 
> there are auditory learners and visual learners.
> I have seen the writings of some correspondents and can definitely tell 
> those who do not read with fingers or eyes.
> And yes, the person is right about the decline in the sighted population 
> because of the digital things.  Look at the shorthand that is forming and 
> all the acronyms that you are so bombarded with that you wish you had a 
> dictionary of them that fit in your pocket.
> Any way, enough of my soap box.  I'm going to bed and sleep off the 
> frustration that illiteracy brings to me.
> Barbara
>
> A Congress that will always do its work in the dark must have something to 
> hide.  The people have spoken, yet they do not listen.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Donna Hill" <penatwork at epix.net>
> Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 3:32 PM
> 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: [stylist] 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?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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