by Tracy Conly
(Tracy Conly is a longtime friend from our days at the Ohio State School for the Blind, a great Braille reader and advocate for the blind. This is her reaction to our March 15 story “A New Tool In The Fight For Braille Literacy.”)
“Braille changes lives. It gives thousands of people independence, learning, literacy, and the enjoyment of reading. Braille opens doors and makes a difference for blind and partially sighted people.” – Royal National Institute of Blind People.
First of all, we’ve been hearing since we were at OSSB that Braille is or soon will be obsolete. Governments, schools and all sorts of agencies and organizations have said for years that only about ten percent of blind people read or even know Braille.
So my first reaction is to wonder why these numbers and things never change. If Braille is obsolete, then why do so many people want Braille displays or want iPhone to keep accessibility up-to-date so that it works with Braille displays?
Many say that in terms of competitive employment, many of those who have such jobs do in fact know and use Braille. They started telling me even in middle school or junior high that books were on tape and eventually we began to have reading machines and computers that could talk to some degree so Braille would not be necessary.
At that time and as I did eventually go to college, I did have to depend on recorded books and I did eventually have a computer that could read the screen to me so I could use that in writing papers. For research, I still needed a human reader and certainly found it most efficient to make Braille notes I could then use later for writing papers and the like.
The huge stumbling block for me then, and still today, is that when hearing things read to me, I do not know the spelling or miss out on punctuation and may be essential. Often when answering questions on a test in a literature class I would have to make a note for the instructor that because I was hearing the book in question, I did not know the spelling of a pertinent character’s name.
Today I often get news items on my iPhone and in order to teach myself about spelling of names, I often painstakingly go reading letter by letter to find out how things are spelled. It could be a person or a place, but I often find things are spelled much differently than I had imagined.
As we’ve already discussed to some degree, employment for the blind is already hard enough to find. If Braille should disappear and be forgotten, woe to those who are still about and looking for jobs. Even those who may be reasonably intelligent will have a much harder time of it. My husband is not a super Braille reader, but he will tell you he’s glad he knows it and he has Braille labels on many things including his 1300 or so vinyl albums.
I was just recently given a link for a Braille puzzle or app of some sort that is for the iPhone. I will be getting it shortly because I am all for anything that promotes using and/or teaching Braille.
I definitely think it’s a shame that it seems to be so hard for blind children to get Braille education and I’d love for adults and college students to understand that learning Braille simply isn’t that hard to do once you get the negativity out of your head and work on it like you do any other subject.
Page 7 