NY Times article on Braille literacy

RantWoman is on several blindness-related email lists and the following item is of course all the buzz on all of them:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03Braille-t.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

RantWoman thanks someone from Poland for posting the link instead of the whole article text. RantWoman SUPPOSES she could have found some unique search string from the article and tried to find it herself after the article's first mention. RantWoman is of course a lazy slug and is grateful just to get the link.

RantWoman comments:

RantWoman LOVES Braille. She wishes she wrote and read it a lot better, but it makes her so, so happy to be able to interact with the structure of all the different words and word roots in the mongrel language that is modern English. RantWoman also loves the mechanical act of writing things down as part of the process of solidifying things n her memory. RantWoman remembers tutorials from elementary school emphasizing that learning things with one's ears and eyes or hands at the same time helps ensure that they are remembered more than one way.


In terms of things like giving a speech without having to hold one's notes right in front of one's face, RantWoman actually wishes she had started working with Braille decades ago. Given the shortage of teachers, this seems like a long shot, but RantWoman can wish anything she darn well wants to.

RantWoman started learning Braille more intentionally a few years ago after one of her pivotal medical events. RantWoman has never been the most diligent student and currently reads much better than she writes. The writing part is a couple different issues. RantWoman is pretty sloppy in her grasp especially of contractions that mainly represent English suffixes. RantWoman can usually figure things out in context when she reads, but she definitely has not yet stored this info in an orderly enough way to be confident of writing things correctly herself.

The other problem is a mechanical, muscle memory issue. People learn to type by making typing so automatic that muscles basically know what to do without the brain having to think. Braille is written backwards when on euses a slate and stylus so there is one cognitive shift that way; there is a different cognitive shift involved if one uses a braille writer with its 6 dots and spacebar under different fingers and different finger combinations than an ordinary typewriter. There are Braille gizmos that can do input either with a braille keyboard or a QWERTY one, but they cost A LOT and RantWoman cannot quite justify either one, no matter how much she keeps trying.

actually reads braille embarrasingly slowly and usually makes it through a couple pages a day. Last night's pleasure reading was something about palm kernal oil, destruction of rain forest, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats and fat metabolism. RantWoman is delighted for one thing to be able to wade through that sort of text. For another thing, reading this sort of item allows RantWoman faintly to pretend that she can graze around like an intellectual dilettante the way she used to do with all manner of regular print.

When RantWoman thinks about gizmos for writing Braille she also thinks about gizmos for compressing and taking braille with her. Generally, the gizmos and gizmo combinations are quite parallel though rantWoman has one eccentricity here as well. Electronic braille displays show text 18 or 40 characters at a time. RantWoman would so like to have a Kindle-sized device that would show braille in paragraphs so she could "skim" and have more spatial relationship with the content. RantWoman thinks she saved a link about a technology that might mkae this kind of presentation possible, but it's still in prototype phase. RantWoman at least gets to keep dreaming.

RantWoman always wants to have cross-cultural perspectives so mention of places like Botswana are impressive. However, RantWoman wonders whether anyone has studied anything analogous about writing among blind people in places like China where both the language structure and written language are quite different forms. RantWoman also gets all science-fictiony and wonders what reading will look like for anyone in an electronics-heavy society in 20 or 50 years. Then RantWoman wonders what happens when the power goes out. Then she goes back to making sure the Nephew can do arithmetic without a calculator and take notes by hand!