Jordan Gilmer has a degenerative condition that eventually will leave him completely blind. But as a child, his teachers did not emphasize Braille, the
system of reading in which a series of raised dots signify letters of the alphabet.
Instead, they insisted he use what little vision he had to read print. By the third grade, he was falling behind in his schoolwork.
"They gave him Braille instruction, but they didn't tell us how to get Braille books, and they didn't want him using it during the day," said Jordan's mother,
Carrie Gilmer of Minneapolis. Teachers said Braille would be "a thing he uses way off in the far distant future, and don't worry about it."
That experience is common: Fewer than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people in
the United States
read Braille, and just 10 percent of blind children are learning it, according to a report released Thursday by the National Federation of the Blind, which
is based in Baltimore.
By comparison, at the height of its use in the 1950s, more than half the nation's blind children were learning Braille. Today, Braille is considered by
many to be too difficult, too outdated, a last resort.
Instead, teachers ask students to rely on audio texts, voice-recognition software or other technology. And teachers who know Braille often must shuttle
between schools, resulting in haphazard instruction, the report says.
"You can find good teachers of the blind in America, but you can't find good programs," said Marc Maurer, the group's president. "There is not a commitment
to this population that is at all significant almost anywhere."
Using technology as a substitute for Braille leaves blind people illiterate, the federation said, citing studies that show blind people who know Braille
are more likely to earn advanced degrees, find good jobs and live independently.
"It's really sad that so many kids are being shortchanged," said Debby Brackett of Stuart, Fla., who pressured schools to provide capable Braille teachers
for her 12-year-old daughter, Winona.
One study found that 44 percent of participants who grew up reading Braille were unemployed, compared with 77 percent for those who relied on print. Overall,
blind adults face 70 percent unemployment.
The federation's report pulled together existing research on Braille literacy, and its authors acknowledge that not enough research has been done. The 10
percent figure comes from federal statistics gathered by the American Printing House for the Blind, a company that develops products for the visually impaired.
The federation also did some original research, including a survey of 500 people that found the ability to read Braille correlated with higher levels of
education, a higher likelihood of employment and higher income.
The report coincides with the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, the Frenchman who invented the Braille code as a teenager. Resistance to his system was immediate;
at one point, the director of Braille's school burned the books he and his classmates had transcribed. The school did not want its blind students becoming
too independent; it made money by selling crafts they produced.
The system caught on, but began declining in the 1960s along with the widespread integration of blind children into public schools. It has continued with
the advent of technology that some believe makes Braille obsolete.
"Back in about 1970 or so, I was heading to college, and somebody said to me, 'Now that you've got the tape recorder, everything will be all right.' In
the early 1980s, somebody else said, 'Now that you've got a talking computer, everything will be all right,'" Maurer said. "They were both wrong. And the
current technology isn't going to make everything all right unless I know how to put my hands on a page that has words on it and read them."
Audio books are no substitute, said Carlton Walker, an attorney and the mother of a legally blind girl from McConnellsburg, Pa. Walker once met a blind
teenager who had only listened to audio books; the teen was shocked to discover that "Once upon a time" was four separate words.
Walker also had to lobby teachers to provide Braille for her 8-year-old daughter, Anna, instead of just large-print books.
"At 3 years old, Anna could compete with very large letters. When you get older, you can't compete," Walker said.
Walker once asked a teacher, "'What are you going to do when she's reading Dickens?' She said, 'Well, we'll just go to audio then.' If that were good enough
for everybody, why do we spend millions of dollars teaching people to read?"
Gilmer, now an 18-year-old aspiring lawyer, worked on his Braille in a summer program when he was in middle school and can now read 125 words a minute,
up from his previously rate, an excruciatingly slow 20 words a minute.
"Just try it," Carrie Gilmer said. "Go get a paragraph, get a stopwatch and try to read 20 words a minute. Try and read that slow and see how frustrating
it is."
Fluent Braille readers can read 200 words a minute or more, the federation says.
Carrie Gilmer is president of a parents' group within the federation for the blind. She believes poor or haphazard instruction is largely responsible for
the decline in Braille literacy, but she says sometimes teachers push Braille only to meet resistance from parents.
"They're afraid of their child looking blind, not fitting in," Gilmer said.
The report outlines ambitious goals for reversing the trend, including lobbying all 50 states to require teachers of blind children to be certified in Braille
instruction by 2015. But its immediate goal is to simply make people aware that there's no substitute for Braille. It's not just a tool to help people
function — it can bring joy, Maurer said.
"The concept of reading Braille for fun is a thing that lots of people don't know," Maurer said. "And yet I do this every day. I love the beautiful, orderly
lines of words that convey a different idea that can stimulate me or make me excited or sad. … This is what we're trying to convey."
No I personally am not a Braille user, but I can fully understand the need for learning Braille. It is much like the need for learning print. When you read Braille, you get to see exactly how the words are formed, plus how they're spelled and used in sentences, paragraphs and other ways that are not mentioned here.
The problem with Braille books is that they're too large to be carried around. The Bible, which takes up only one book in standard print; takes many volumes in Braille, and is rather expensive to own. With today's current technology, there is no reason why a Braille tablet device couldn't be invented that would resemble a braille page with a refreshable screen much like the refreshable Braille displays on many adaptive devices for the blind.
This special Braille tablet would be the same size as a sheet of Braille paper and have a screen the same size which would display an entire Braille page from an SD card, or built-im memory. The technology already exists for digital Braille because there are translation devices that are built into the many devices that are currently being used by the blind that translate text into Braille dots, both in grade 1 and grade 2 Braille. So having a tablet sized device that represents and entire Braille page that digitally produces the Braille dots would be a great way to reintroduce the reading of Braille to many of Today's blind readers. There would be a series of buttons at the bottom of the device for navigation through the file, such as backward and forward to act as page turning devices. The Braille tablet could resemble a Braille book, but a very thin one indeed. That way, the user could store litterally thousands upon thousands of books in the device, and still be able to read a Braille book much like he or she would if they were reading a non-digitized version of that same book.
This I think would be the revolution in Braille because it would strongly encourage newly blind individuals to begin reading Braille without the bother of those very large, cumbersome Braille books. The device would accept plain text files, word documents, pdf documents and other text related documents into it and instantly translate that material into either grade 1, or grade 2 braille.
The device would run off of long lasting batteries with the option of being powered by wall outlet. When plugged into the wall outlet, it owuld charge up for external use away from home, or the office.
As far as media storage goes, the device could have its own internal storage, or use external storage such as an SD card for material. What a device like this would do for students in school, is it would instantly translate any textual information directly into grade 1, or grade 2 Braille for the student to read in class. Litterally thousands of books could be stored on removable media, thus allowing the individual to have at their disposal all the material they would need for study, or leisure.
A device like this would hopefully spark a real interest in learning Braille,and improving upon Braille literacy. So this is one way that modern technology could be used to bring back the love of reading Braille once again. That way, Louis Braille's invention would never be put to waste and gone by the wayside.
Brian returned from Seeing Eye on April 16 and says that his business plan is going to the dogs! However, since his new business partner is a dog this is not a bad thing!
