[stylist] Quote to ponder - taken to another level
Aine Kelly-Costello
ainekc at gmail.com
Fri Feb 8 22:03:55 UTC 2013
Here are some perhaps rather jumbled thoughts ...
I learned braille as a very young child. I think I started
pre-braille activities at 3, and I have a few vague memories of
reading a progressive series of books at four (I lived in Ireland
then, where starting school at four is the norm). These books
were progressive in the sense that after I'd mastered grade 1
(letters, punctuation and numbers only), each new one introduced
me to one or two new contractions. I'd say I had a reasonably
good grasp of braille by the time I was six, and would have
finished learning all the contractions around then (for the
non-braille readers, Braille contractions are plentiful ...
there's probably two hundred or so in English). The risk you run
by learning contractions "too soon" is one of not actually being
able to spell the darn words you know contractions for in the
first place. For example, once you know that "receive" is written
rcv, it's very easy to forget whether it's spelled "receive" or
"recieve", seeing as practically everything you read in Braille
will contain the contraction. When I was little, I remember there
being questions raised about which contractions were and were not
legit in spelling tests. In my opinion, set letter combinations
like ar, in, en, ing, com, con etc are okay, but writing rcv for
"receive" or dot 5 q for "question" are obviously not. My point
here is that even if you read Braille, spelling may still be
tricky.
Regarding whether a blind person can learn visually ... That
depends how you define "visual", if you ask me. I've always been
a reasonably accurate speller (the one exception to that being
homophones which I'll talk about below). The few times I've had
to memorize spelling lists, I listen to the word and then an
"image" pops up in my head which "looks" like me feeling the
Braille. Therefore I think I remember the word by remembering how
it looks in grade 2 (contracted) Braille, not letter by letter.
On a side note, I think a knowledge of grade 2 makes it easier
for me to see words in their morphemes or syllables because of
the way contractions go. When I'm doing crosswords with my
family, I am always the quickest to work out how many letters
there are in a long-ish word.
Moving on to screenreaders, here are some thoughts (in no
particular order:
1. There are many different synthesizers out there. Of course
they all have their good points, their differences and their
idiosyncrasies. For example, one might say "tear" as "teer" while
another would say "tare". One calls an acquaintance whose last
name is Mishoe "Misho" while another says "mis-hoe". This trend
is a bit of a pain and doesn't exactly facilitate recognition of
words which are in fact spelled the same but pronounced
differently. It's especially a pain when the screenreader in
question thinks it's reading one language while it's actually
reading another. I'm very used to my BrailleNote's English
Spanish but JAW's is totally different; I find it much trickier
to decipher and have to pay very close attention.
2. A lot of screenreader users, from my experience anyway (and
I'm sure I've done it before), tend to occasionally infer
spelling of words new to them solely from listening, and without
checking on them. I've had various screenreader users e-mail me
with my name, "Aine", spelled "Ain" or "Ane" because according to
JAWS, these three spellings are identical (incidentally, the
BrailleNote's keynote gold synthesizer pronounces "Ain" as
"Ann").
3. Homophones. I have a problem here ... Admit it, we've probably
all written the wrong "there/their/they're" at some point. But
I've taken this case to the extreme: I have in the past mixed up
"role" and "roll", "route" and "root", "jell" and "gel", "sight"
and "site" ... Now of course I know exactly what all these words
mean and which is which (now, at least ...) but I strongly
suspect that my accidental lack of respect for their spelling has
rather a lot to do with reliance on speech for reading. The other
problem, evidently, is when you're proofreading, if you rely
solely on the speech and don't use a braille display (which I
admit I often do with long texts as it's about thrae times
faster) you have no way to "catch" homophones, leaving them to go
unnoticed and for whoever you might be sending your writing to to
see.
4. Human accents. If you live in Australia or New Zealand, or
even some parts of England, you will know that the words
"flaw"/"floor" and "saw"/"sore" can often sound remarkably alike
in every day speech. So alike, in fact, that people don't always
realize how to spell them. I have seen two e-mails, written in
reasonably formal situations by two different sighted adults,
informing me that such and such was a "very highly sort after"
teacher. This is taken to another level among blind people,
though: I've seen people talk about "Lattern" (Latin) dancing and
"precortions" (precautions) among others. I spent three and a
half years in Canada and have parents with mid-Atlantic accents
so I am happily free from this problem. I do remember my brother
arriving home from his first day of school in New Zealand though
(he was five, and we'd just recently moved there), claiming they
were being taught the letter w with a song that went "wheat and
windy, wih, wih, wih". And so, he was introduced to the strong
"ehh" sound in the New Zealand accent ...
Now on to the advantages of braille. Screenreaders, as some have
mentioned already, are a pain when it comes to understanding form
and recognizing pudctuation. Sure they can read you the
punctuation, but being told there's a comma and actually reading
that comma for yourself are in my opinion too different things).
This is especially true of poetry. The first few times I read any
poem, it is ALWAYS by hand. I have a BrailleNote with a braille
display, and this is one of its many uses. To be honest, though,
if a blind person really wants to see form clearly, you can't
beat hard-copy Braille in my opinion. For example, I remember
having to multiply matrices in my year 11 Maths exam. This was
quite literally done with one hand on one matrix reading
horizontally and the other hand on the other one reading
vertically. If I had tried to do that with a screen reader I
think my brain might have overloaded ...
Beyond seeing form and punctuation, there are obviously more
advantages of being able to read Braille. Braille Music, for
instance. I'd never have been able to join orchestras and be
where I am at the moment music-wise without it. What about
learning a new language? I like to be able to read books in
Spanish by hand because, it not being nearly as strong as my
English, I still miss detail when using speech. It's also great
for giving speeches and debates. I would not be at all amused if
I had to speak in an impromptu debate without being able to read
my notes in Braille. Being able to participate in class when
people are reading out, say, lines from different characters in a
play, is definitely nice. Moreover, I know I'd really have
struggled to do well in Maths without Braille, and I'm not just
talking about the matrices. I don't know how you could proofread
long, complicated calculus with a screenreader in an exam, it'd
surely be slow at best.
Anyway, there are my musings on the topic ...
Aine
---- Original Message ------
From: "Aine Kelly-Costello" <ainekc at gmail.com
Subject: Fw: [stylist] Quote to ponder - taken to another level
Date sent: Sat, 9 Feb 2013 07:21:12 +1300
----- Original Message -----
From: "Lynda Lambert" <llambert at zoominternet.net
To: "Writer's Division Mailing List" <stylist at nfbnet.org
Sent: Saturday, February 09, 2013 7:02 AM
Subject: Re: [stylist] Quote to ponder - taken to another level
This is a really good question, Robert.
I have noticed that so many blind people spell things so wonky,
and maybe
this is why. I always wonder is spelling is really taught and
learned
visually. I really have no experience with any of the discussion
on
Braille because I do not use it - I do everything with
electronics and
some things with a CCTV. I have only had sight loss for 5
years, so I
really have no idea how blind children learn things like
spelling,
grammar, formatting, and punctuation. To me, they are all
visual, and it
is very hard for me to understand it any other way - well, I
really don't
understand it any other way. When I am reading (listening to a
voice on a
machine) I am still listening visually. I see it in my mind, and
if I
cannot see it that way, it's confusing to me. Auditory skills
would rate
very low for me. Everyone has strength in certain skills and
ways of
learning - and I am a Visual learner above all else. That did
not change -
I still have to be able to SEE it to remember it - I have to
stop and SEE
a picture in my mind before it sticks with me.
Writing and reading, for me, has always been a visual
experience. This
makes me wonder, can a person who has always been blind be a
Visual
learner? And, then, I wonder, how does a blind person visualize
things?
These are some things I am thinking about and working with a
blind painter
friend to put together an exhibition on how people see and
visualize.
Lynda
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robert Leslie Newman" <newmanrl at cox.net
To: "'Writer's Division Mailing List'" <stylist at nfbnet.org
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2013 9:03 AM
Subject: [stylist] Quote to ponder - taken to another level
We were discussing how the impact of what is read is influenced
by the
reader, themselves (by what they personally bring to the
reading-table).
And here is an interesting thought or outcome that is happening
to too
many
blind people! First as a baseline thought - the sighted
student/reader
who
uses print to read literature, educational stuff and the like -
they are
reading the words themselves, visually scanning, actively
processing ---
while during this process, the student is being exposed to
important
"reading related/literacy" features/elements such as: format,
punctuation,
spelling, and features like tables, graphs, pictures, etc. Also,
along
the
same line of literacy, of actively reading for oneself --- The
blind
reader
who has the skill of Braille can get the same basic exposure to
content,
plus all the important literacy features as - format,
punctuation,
spelling
and the other stuff. However, in today's world, at least in this
country,
Braille is not being taught as a first-line method of reading
for the
non-print reader! And yeah, you all have heard this gripe, this
warning
before. There again my point today is a bit different: My
thought,
question
is --- hey --- picture this- if you could not read print, did
not know
Braille and could only hear new information, be it a textbook,
or poem or
piece of prose --- you were not getting exposed to formatting,
punctuation,
or spelling of anything you heard;
And so I ask does this then essentially take the blind person
back to the
preprint era, back to learning via the oral tradition? Yeah ---
what are
these teachers thinking? (Another bazaar thought - what do you
think
these
teachers who are doing this to the blind would do --- if they
were to
find
that in school their very own sighted children would have print
taken
away
and their child was restricted to only listening to what was
being
taught??)
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