[Vabs] Fwd: Listening to Braille from the NY Times

[Ashley Bramlett]

Hi,
I learned braille and print as a kid; braille after print.  I find it very 
useful.  I have a Braille Note and I take notes in braille all the time.
What do you all think?

I find Ms. Sloate's comments offensive.  She says braille is arcane and 
synthetic speech is the future of reading.  She does not speak for me nor 
the many blind people using braille daily.  All the more reason to read 
braille and educate the public so articles like this won't be written.

Ashley
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Corbb O'Connor" <corbbo at gmail.com>
To: "Virginia Association of Blind Students list" <vabs at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 03, 2010 8:06 PM
Subject: [Vabs] Fwd: Listening to Braille from the NY Times


>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: "Joe Orozco" <jsorozco at gmail.com>
> Date: January 3, 2010 5:14:27 PM EST
> To: "'National Association of Blind Students mailing list'" 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >
> Subject: [nabs-l] Listening to Braille from the NY Times
> Reply-To: National Association of Blind Students mailing list 
> <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
> >
>
> Listening to Braille
> By RACHEL AVIV
> Published: December 30, 2009
>
> 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.
>
>
>
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