[stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker speakingoutagainst Braille

Wed Jan 13 16:47:47 UTC 2010

I thought the whole rest of the article was very insightful.  I agreed with 
quite a bit of it.  I was just annoyed with the attitude of the blind 
person.
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: "Judith Bron" <jbron at optonline.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 8:54 AM
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker 
speakingoutagainst Braille

> 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.
>>>
>>> Hear clips from "The Last Straw" at:
>>> http://cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill
>>>
>>> Apple I-Tunes
>>>
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>>> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>>> www.padnfb.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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