[stylist] Angels Light Chapter One Revision
Watson, Katherine M
WatsonKM05 at uww.edu
Wed Jan 13 18:37:04 UTC 2010
Dear Katie,
Your revisionof Angel's Light was wonderful! I especially liked the dialogue of the "angel" because she seemed so dignified. You may want to proofread your work a little more--just to get rid of some typing errors and some sentences that just sound a little awkward. If you use a Screen-reader, you can just close your eyes and listen, having it read the document to you. Otherwise, your images were very vivid! I could picture everything! That is a great story!
Katie W
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Today's Topics:
1. NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking out against
Braille (Donna Hill)
2. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking out
against Braille (James H. "Jim" Canaday M.A. N6YR)
3. Re: Braille-- Research in the Rockies (Robert Leslie Newman)
4. Angels Light Chapter One Revision (kec92 at ourlink.net)
5. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Braille (Barbara Hammel)
6. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Braille (James H. "Jim" Canaday M.A. N6YR)
7. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Braille (Judith Bron)
8. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Braille (Judith Bron)
9. Re: Braille-- Research in the Rockies (loristay at aol.com)
10. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Braille (Donna Hill)
11. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Bra (loristay at aol.com)
12. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Brai (loristay at aol.com)
13. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Braille (Barbara Hammel)
14. Re: NY Times Magazine features blind brokerspeakingoutagainst
Braille (Angela Fowler)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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: [stylist] 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
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/dwh99
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http://www.facebook.com/donna.w.hill.
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:51:55 -0600
From: "James H. \"Jim\" Canaday M.A. N6YR" <n6yr at sunflower.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking out against Braille
Message-ID: <201001122251.o0CMpuoJ024340 at smtp.sunflower.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
I read this a few days. agree with some of it, especially the last
two-thirds. one of my chapter members sent it to me.
the greatest ommission in this is that sighted people are also
undergoing a bit of a reading/writing revolution with various digital
devices, use of digital documents, abandonment of hard copy textbooks
and other reading matterial. now they read and they still see the
letters, as we do not, but research shows that people conceptualize a
virtual document much differently from hard copy. also, virtual
documents usually lack certain physical elements (like place on the
page) that help with remembering what you've read. btw, in my thesis
I asserted that that same benefit for hard copy applies to blind
people reading braille.
while I was troubled by some of the writer's emphasis, I appreciated
the article Donna.
jc
Jim Canaday M.A.
Lawrence, KS
At 03:32 PM 1/12/2010, you wrote:
>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
>
>phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>
>Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>www.padnfb.org
>
>
>
>
>
>E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (7.0.0.514)
>Database version: 6.14110
>http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/
>_______________________________________________
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>
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------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:02:16 -0600
From: "Robert Leslie Newman" <newmanrl at cox.net>
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] Braille-- Research in the Rockies
Message-ID: <8975FBF1BAC64B5D88BC8BCBE76633C4 at D78R0TG1>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Thank you Lori, I saw this one on most other NFB lists- if I saw it here, I
couldn't put a date on it, but good to have it here, now. That would be a
very interesting event to attend. (I'm not sure what I could add to that
meeting. One thought was to suggest, for a educational drama, they get
someone to present my Louis Braille speech. Tweak it where necessary to fit
the event.) We, the Division have our writing contest for blind youth, and
all the material has to be in Braille. A good thing, but in my head I can't
see how to use this to further the Rocky Mountain Braille gathering. Does
any one else have something fitting for the campaign.
Robert Leslie Newman
Email- newmanrl at cox.net
THOUGHT PROVOKER Website-
Http://www.thoughtprovoker.info
-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of loristay at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:14 AM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: [stylist] Braille-- Research in the Rockies
this came to the editors and journalist's list, but it seems to be of
interest to our group too, so I am sharing it.
Lori
In a message dated 1/11/10 10:21:28 PM, JChwalow at nfb.org writes:
>
>
> Dear Colleague:
>
>
> Because of your demonstrated interest in Braille,
> we are forwarding an announcement of the first
> international seminar devoted entirely to
> Braille. We would like to encourage you to submit
> an abstract for presentation. Please note that
> the deadline for submissions has been extended to February 1, 2010.
>
>
> Research in the Rockies: Research <?xml:namespace
> prefix = st1 ns =
> "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"
> />Summit on Braille Reading and Writing
>
>
> June 10-12, 2010, Denver, Colorado at the Denver Marriott City Center
>
>
> Call for Papers
>
>
>
>
> Sponsored by<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =
> "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
>
> National Center for Severe and Sensory Disabilities (NCSSD)
> Bresnahan-Halstead Center on Disabilities
> The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) Jernigan Institute
>
>
> Purpose:
>
> The purpose of this conference is to explore
> current and emerging research from a wide range
> of disciplines that pertains to Braille reading and writing.
>
>
> Call-for-Papers Submission Guidelines:
>
> ?? ? ? ?? Submit 250-word abstract online at:
> <http://www.unco.edu/ncssd>www.unco.edu/ncssd
>
> ?? ? ? ?? Submission deadline has been extended to February 1, 2010
>
> ?? ? ? ?? ***Anything submitted after midnight on
> February 1, 2010 will not be accepted***
>
> ?? ? ? ?? Presentation formats:
>
> a.? ? ?? Research paper presentation (20 minutes)
>
> b.? ? ?? Panel (minimum 60 minutes)
>
> c.? ? ?? Poster (posters will be presented in roundtable sessions)
>
> ?? ? ? ?? If you have problems with the online
> submission form, please contact: <mailto:ncssd at unco.edu>ncssd at unco.edu
>
> ?? ? ? ?? Please note that any handout material
> must be made available in Braille, large print,
> and electronic formats. Provide explanations for all PowerPoint
> presentations.
>
>
> Proposals Invited from:
>
> Cognitive scientists, linguists, educators,
> rehabilitation specialists, neurologists,
> sociologists and experimental psychologists,
> researchers in haptic and tactile perception,
> demographers, occupational therapists, and others
>
>
> A. Judith Chwalow, DrPH
>
> Director of Research, Jernigan Institute
>
> National Federation of the Blind
>
> 200 East Wells Street
>
> Jernigan Place
>
> Baltimore, MD 21230
>
>
>
> 410 659 9314 x 2404
>
> FAX: 410 659 5129
>
> jchwalow at NFB.org
>
> _
>
_______________________________________________
Writers Division web site:
http://www.nfb-writers-division.org <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
stylist mailing list
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http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/stylist_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:16:56 -0800
From: kec92 at ourlink.net
To: <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: [stylist] Angels Light Chapter One Revision
Message-ID: <50772.1263359816 at ourlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hi again,
I've been working hard to start editting my book and I wanted to see
if you guys wanted to read it. Hope all of you have fun with it.
Your comments are appreciated.
Katie
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------------------------------
Message: 5
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:48:57 -0600
From: "Barbara Hammel" <poetlori8 at msn.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking outagainst Braille
Message-ID: <BAY113-DS1081D9C2EBF3F7B7A6EDC9EB6B0 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=response
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
>
> phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>
> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
> www.padnfb.org
>
>
>
>
>
> E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (7.0.0.514)
> Database version: 6.14110
> http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/
> _______________________________________________
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>
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------------------------------
Message: 6
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:10:49 -0600
From: "James H. \"Jim\" Canaday M.A. N6YR" <n6yr at sunflower.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking outagainst Braille
Message-ID: <201001130610.o0D6AoDW028554 at smtp.sunflower.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
yes Barb,
that's what I was referring to about the first third of the
article. this woman would be even sharper and more effective if she
had braille. I'm certain she would find it quite useful in her work.
jc
Jim Canaday M.A.
Lawrence, KS
At 11:48 PM 1/12/2010, you wrote:
>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
>>
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------------------------------
Message: 7
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:54:10 -0500
From: Judith Bron <jbron at optonline.net>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Braille
Message-ID: <001401ca9460$43ee1c50$3302a8c0 at dell5150>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1;
reply-type=response
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
>>
>> phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>>
>> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>> www.padnfb.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> _______________________________________________
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>
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------------------------------
Message: 8
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 09:56:34 -0500
From: Judith Bron <jbron at optonline.net>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking outagainst Braille
Message-ID: <001801ca9460$99767910$3302a8c0 at dell5150>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=iso-8859-1;
reply-type=response
But she's already been told by the sighted world that if she's going to be
like all the others, she shouldn't do something that will make her
different. She's caught up in that image thing, either consciously or
subliminally. Judith
----- Original Message -----
From: "James H. "Jim" Canaday M.A. N6YR" <n6yr at sunflower.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 1:10 AM
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker speaking
outagainst Braille
> yes Barb,
> that's what I was referring to about the first third of the article. this
> woman would be even sharper and more effective if she had braille. I'm
> certain she would find it quite useful in her work.
> jc
> Jim Canaday M.A.
> Lawrence, KS
>
> At 11:48 PM 1/12/2010, you wrote:
>>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
>>>
>>>phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>>>
>>>Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>>>www.padnfb.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (7.0.0.514)
>>>Database version: 6.14110
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>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Writers Division web site:
>>>http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
>>><http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
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>>
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>>http://www.nfb-writers-division.org <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>>
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------------------------------
Message: 9
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:13:36 EST
From: loristay at aol.com
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [stylist] Braille-- Research in the Rockies
Message-ID: <738e.663459a8.387f4b30 at aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Probably the best use would be a paper on how braille has suited and helped
you and your students, Robert. They are asking for an abstract rather
than a speech.
Lori
In a message dated 1/12/10 11:02:40 PM, newmanrl at cox.net writes:
>
> > Because of your demonstrated interest in Braille,
> > we are forwarding an announcement of the first
> > international seminar devoted entirely to
> > Braille. We would like to encourage you to submit
> > an abstract for presentation. Please note that
> > the deadline for submissions has been extended to February 1, 2010
>
------------------------------
Message: 10
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:20:42 -0500
From: Donna Hill <penatwork at epix.net>
To: Writer's Division Mailing List <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking outagainst Braille
Message-ID: <4B4DF2DA.3090709 at epix.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Jim and Barb,
On another list which discussed this article, many people pointed out
that there is a class distinction here. Whether she grew up wealthy or
is simply wealthy now, she appears to have lost touch with the realities
that face most of us. She has assistants and probably drivers and a
Manhattan apartment, in addition to a six-figure income -- maybe seven.
It was her presumptiveness in suggesting that Braille should be
abolished that hit me the hardest. It's like the story of Marie
Antoinette being told that the peasants are out of bread and saying,
"Let them eat cake." Maybe that's not the best analogy, but it's what I
thought of when I first read it.
There are some interesting comments about the realities of what comes
out of audio learners when they try to write. I'm sure Laura has someone
else to do her spelling. How does she tell the spices apart? Or, does
someone else do that too? I think that for the wealthy, having
assistants is often a badge of honor, a proof that they've made it. For
many of us, even beyond the problems of finding and paying competent
help, there is a sense that it is a mark of our lack of independence.
Donna Hill
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
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
www.padnfb.org
James H. "Jim" Canaday M.A. N6YR wrote:
> yes Barb,
> that's what I was referring to about the first third of the article.
> this woman would be even sharper and more effective if she had
> braille. I'm certain she would find it quite useful in her work.
> jc
> Jim Canaday M.A.
> Lawrence, KS
>
> At 11:48 PM 1/12/2010, you wrote:
>> 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
>>>
>>> phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>>>
>>>
>>> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>>> www.padnfb.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Writers Division web site:
>>> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
>>> <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
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>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Writers Division web site:
>> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
>> <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>>
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>> stylist at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/n6yr%40sunflower.com
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>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
> <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
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------------------------------
Message: 11
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:27:00 EST
From: loristay at aol.com
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speaking outagainst Bra
Message-ID: <7b0a.722e19ec.387f4e54 at aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Beautiful point!
As for the woman in the Times article, i wonder what she will do when
Newsline in New York closes down?
The Commission for the Blind owes newsline here money since November of 08.
If you ask, they say sure, they are still funding it, but then there is
no money coming. At the end of this month, we will not have access to
Newsline in New York State. David went on TV to tell of the problem. Talk
about someone wanting power over someone else! The Commission for the Blind
does not seem to like anything that they don't control or didn't think of.
Lori
In a message dated 1/13/10 12:50:22 AM, poetlori8 at msn.com writes:
> 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??
>
------------------------------
Message: 12
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:29:53 EST
From: loristay at aol.com
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Brai
Message-ID: <7ca7.424501d.387f4f01 at aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Well, there you go. It would make a great abstract for that Rocky
mountain thing.
Lori
In a message dated 1/13/10 9:55:31 AM, jbron at optonline.net writes:
> 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 -----
>
------------------------------
Message: 13
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:47:47 -0600
From: "Barbara Hammel" <poetlori8 at msn.com>
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind broker
speakingoutagainst Braille
Message-ID: <BAY113-DS5FEC7F6094684FD3EEED4EB6B0 at phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=response
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
>>>
>>> phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>>>
>>> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>>> www.padnfb.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> E-mail message checked by Spyware Doctor (7.0.0.514)
>>> Database version: 6.14110
>>> http://www.pctools.com/en/spyware-doctor-antivirus/
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Writers Division web site:
>>> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
>>> <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>>>
>>> stylist mailing list
>>> stylist at nfbnet.org
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>>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/poetlori8%40msn.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Writers Division web site:
>> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org
>> <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>>
>> stylist mailing list
>> stylist at nfbnet.org
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>> To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
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>> http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/jbron%40optonline.net
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Writers Division web site:
> http://www.nfb-writers-division.org <http://www.nfb-writers-division.org/>
>
> stylist mailing list
> stylist at nfbnet.org
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>
------------------------------
Message: 14
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:55:59 -0800
From: "Angela Fowler" <fowlers at syix.com>
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind
brokerspeakingoutagainst Braille
Message-ID: <D8C9F6F3819A40A999CC0BA6934A7535 at AngelaPC>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Hello everyone,
What follows is a reaction to the article which I posted to another
list, but which I hope you find interesting.
Let me just make a few points here. I learned Braille as a child, but it
quickly was supplanted by technology as my primary method of accessing
information. This has lead to some consequences which I believe hamper my
productivity. I'm a good writer, but a horrible speller, and homonyms, such
as decent and descent... I get them wrong all the time. Often it takes me
longer to spell check an email than it does to write it. "A victim of the
digital age," is what I call it, and while I wouldn't give up the
technology, I wish I'd kept my Braille skills up.
Contrary to what the investment manager who lead off the article
would have us believe, Braille is the most efficient way of doing many
things. It's a God send when making a speech in which you need an outline.
I've chaired many a meeting, trying to listen to the meeting and the agenda
at the same time and thought "Man I wish I had this in Braille. This is not
to mention, referring to outlines while writing essays, directly quoting
sources, (goes back to this hearing two things at once thing), I could go on
and on. I guess the best way to put it is this: Technology gives me access
to information, Braille allows me to use it in the most efficient way
possible.
Now, I would like to take issue with something which was stated
toward the bottom of the article. Here I am quoting the article directly.
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.
This is at best sloppy writing, and at worst a deliberate
misrepresentation of our response to those folks who choose to continue
reading print, either because they are unable at this time to seek
instruction in Braille, or they have not come to terms with their blindness
yet. We seek to make them comfortable with the idea of Braille, not frown
upon then for not using it. We seek not to treat them as outcasts, butt to
welcome them with open arms and show them that liberating skill, Braille,
that we ourselves are so fortunate to have found. If we frown upon anything,
it is an educational system which refuses to teach Braille, an education
system of which those still-struggling print readers are truly victims.
Well, that's my two cents... For now anyway. Look forward to hearing
everyone else's response to this interesting article.
Angela
-----Original Message-----
From: stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Barbara Hammel
Sent: Wednesday, January 13, 2010 8:48 AM
To: Writer's Division Mailing List
Subject: Re: [stylist] NY Times Magazine features blind
brokerspeakingoutagainst Braille
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?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
>>>
>>> Apple I-Tunes
>>>
>>>
phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=259244374
>>>
>>> Performing Arts Division of the National Federation of the Blind
>>> www.padnfb.org
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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