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Braille Bicentennial

Braille Literacy: Lessons from a Right-Handed World

Are you right-handed?  Most of us are, and – from the cashier's station at the check out line of our grocery store to the good pair of scissors we got for Christmas -- our world is designed with the right hand in mind.  We don't think twice about sitting in those chairs with the arm rest/writing surface on the right or about the piano, which requires a person to play the more complicated melody with the right hand while the left takes a supportive and usually simpler part.  Years ago, parents and teachers forced left-handed children to use their right hands in order to avoid the stigma which accompanied left-handedness – a practice abandoned when it became clear that this was doing more harm than good.  Today, with a leftie in the White House and consumer choices that allow the southpaws among us to do it their own way, left-handedness is not the obstacle to living a normal life which it once was.

"I'm left-handed," says Carlton Anne Cook Walker (McConnellsburg, PA), "I could probably learn to do some things right-handed.  But, I would never function as well as a right-handed person does.  Despite the fact that the world is set up for right-handed people, I do better in that world as a left-handed person than I would if I tried to be right-handed."

A similar situation currently exists with vision.  It's a sighted world, but some of us have either lost or never had sufficient vision to read.  Nonetheless, the common practice is to force children with low vision – even many who are legally blind – to struggle with print.  Walker, an attorney and mother of a legally blind nine-year-old, volunteers as an advocate for children with low or no vision and their parents, helping them determine the best approach to their children's education.

"The system is broken," says Walker, who is president of the Pennsylvania Organization of Parents of Blind Children (PaPoBC), "I've never met one educator who has bad intentions, but there is so much fear – fear of both blindness and Braille.  They are inclined to equate blindness with cognitive loss.  Part of the problem is that the educators are not familiar with blindness.  Since blindness is a low incidence disability, they don't get much experience with real blind people."

In sorting out what is happening to these kids, Walker advises that we keep two things in mind.  First, there are all degrees of vision loss.  Vision is used for many varied and complicated tasks from reading and looking at pictures, maps and graphs to recognizing faces, walking or running on different surfaces and functioning in areas of low or changing light. Since a given condition will affect different people differently, optimal strategies must take into account these subtle variations.  That brings us to the second point.  The law requires that school districts provide students with an “individualized education plan” (IEP).  Early grades don't test for reading speed and make the comparisons that a child with a certain intellect is not reading at the rate of their sighted peers, so it is easy for a child with normal intelligence who has a severe vision loss to get stuck in an environment where they are either considered to be cognitively challenged or under-achievers.

Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs), who generally possess degrees in special education and are assigned to low vision students, spend very little time with each child.  Most go from school to school seeing over thirty and up to seventy kids.  They don't get to observe how the child is interacting with their peers, changing class or dealing with maps, pictures and other things.  The people who are in a position to observe these things are the aides, hired to stay with the child.  These people are generally low paid high school graduates.  They have limited experience with blind people and their capabilities, and they have little expectation of the child succeeding in life.

This, however, is just the beginning of the problem.  Not only can't the aides recognize the signs that a child is falling behind where they should be based on their intellect, they inhibit the very thing that mainstreaming is supposed to accomplish – the integration of the child into the general society.

"Too many of them hover over the kids," says Walker, "They allow the child to depend on them instead of encouraging the child to do things for himself or herself.  They are usually so physically close to the student that other children in the class don't interact with their classmate, but talk to the aide instead, denying the child irreplaceable opportunities to develop social skills and the feeling of belonging."

Her suggestion is that aides, or more appropriately paraprofessionals, be trained to read and write Braille so that they can Braille classroom materials for the student and translate the student's Braille into print for the teacher to grade.

"That would give them something productive to do.  They should be at least ten feet away from the student," Walker says, "That would be enough to allow for more peer interaction.  Too often, the student ends up having an adult aide as a best friend."

Large caseloads are not the only problem with the TVIs themselves.  According to Walker, many don't hold out much hope for blind kids to be successful, independent adults, and there is a pervasive loathing/fear of Braille.  Parents, who assume teachers are the experts, are unlikely to know any blind people personally, so they don't realize that there are blind lawyers, engineers, chemists, doctors, journalists, teachers, and so on.  They aren't told that, although less than ten percent of blind people read Braille, of the mere thirty percent of working-age blind Americans who are employed, ninety percent are Braille readers. 

"Braille is considered failure," Walker says of the TVIs, "their training is to find some way for the children to read print, to remain "normal."  No one wants their child to be blind, so many parents will allow their children to struggle with print, even admonish them for not applying themselves.  The kids have no free time for anything, because it takes them so long to do their homework.  As they grow up, they fall further and further behind academically and socially, and the parents and professionals accept it all as inevitable because they don't really believe a blind person can succeed."

Another issue with the TVIs is their familiarity with Braille.  Even in the specialized Masters programs for TVIs, they have only a few months of Braille instruction.  Since only ten percent of blind children are taught Braille, the TVI may not teach braille for years at a time.  They simply don't remember Braille, and they know that they will have to re-educate themselves, if they recommend it.  Also, they are rarely familiar with the two-handed method for reading Braille which results in much higher reading speeds.  In this method, the left hand reads the first half of the line and then jumps to the next line while the right hand finishes.

When Braille is taught, the students rarely get more than a few hours of instruction per week, and many do not get daily instruction in Braille.  Walker sees an ironic contradiction in this.

"It's strange," she muses, "On one hand, they don't think blind kids have much potential, and on the other, when they do teach them Braille, they expect the blind child to get by with far fewer hours of Braille reading instruction than they expect the sighted children to need in print reading.  And, the sighted kids have incidental reading instruction all over the place – signs, labels, tee shirts and so on -- while the blind child has none of that re-enforcement for Braille."

In Pennsylvania, where the Walkers live, the available national certification in literary Braille is not required.  The Pennsylvania Parents of Blind Children (PaPoBC), which is part of the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children (NOPBC), a division of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is trying to change that:
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/Parents_and_Teachers.asp

The unions, however, have fought it, saying that the TVIs are already certified and should not be forced to meet additional certification standards.  Walker would like teachers of what she calls "non-visual skills" to be recruited from can-do disciplines like the sciences and math.  They would be educated and certified in non-visual skills exclusively.

"My daughter, Anna," Walker continues, "can read large print for about five or ten minutes.  After that, she gets painful headaches and can't do much of anything for over an hour."

Many children are in this situation.  They have some sight and because they are not totally blind, schools recommend against and often refuse to teach them Braille.  The alternatives – large print, magnification and closed circuit television (CCTV) -- suffice as adaptations.  Reading this way rarely results in a child being able to read print as quickly and with the comprehension with which their fully sighted intellectual peers read regular print.  Low vision students spend hours doing simple elementary-level homework.  This leaves them no time for reading for pleasure, no time for hanging out with their friends and no time for extra-curricular activities.  The lack of these things, in addition to ongoing eye strain, cannot produce a healthy, happy, well-adjusted person.

"Anna Catherine is fully mainstreamed in her public elementary school," says Walker, "and Braille is the reason."

Anna is the 2009 second/third-grade first place winner in the "Braille Readers are Leaders" contest.  She received $50, a certificate of merit and an all-expenses paid trip for herself and her mother to the NFB's national convention in Detroit in July.  The contest is part of the NFB's "Braille Readers are Leaders" campaign:
http://braille.org

The campaign seeks to double the number of blind students learning Braille by 2015. 

Congress recognized the importance of this issue in authorizing the Louis Braille Bicentennial Silver Dollar, released in March.  The campaign will receive matching funds of $10 for every coin sold this year up to $4 million.  Contact the US Mint, 1-800-USA-Mint (872-6468) or visit:
http://usmint.gov

Carlton credits the National Federation of the Blind for helping her turn Anna's life around.  As a three-year-old, Anna was able to compete using large block letters.  But reading gets more complicated as a child progresses through school.  Walker, who had to battle with Anna's school to get them to take Anna and Braille seriously, learned early on that the common recommendation for kids who can no longer read large print is recorded books. 

Audio books, however, are no substitute for Braille.  Walker had this message driven home to her once when she met a blind teenager who had never learned Braille and was using recorded books.  The teen was shocked to learn that "Once upon a time" is not all one word.  Braille shows spelling, punctuation and sentence structure just as print does.

"If audio books were good enough for everybody," asks Walker, "why do we spend millions of dollars teaching sighted children to read print?"

The fact is that listening to books is not good enough for everybody, and it shouldn't be good enough for anybody with another option.  Listening to stories was what humans, regardless of their vision, did in the days before writing was developed.  The definition of literacy is the ability to read and "write" in a given language and is inexorably connected to the mastery of spelling and syntax.  It presupposes the existence of a symbolic representation of the spoken word.  For blind and low vision people, Braille is that representation, and no other alternative exists which has the power to give true literacy to non-print readers.

 

About the Author

Donna W. Hill is an author, singer/songwriter, speaker and avid knitter. A volunteer publicist for the Performing Arts Division, National Federation of the Blind, she works for improved opportunities for blind Americans.

http://www.padnfb.org

A breast cancer survivor, she promotes self-exam. Hear clips from The Last Straw at:

http://cdbaby.com/cd/donnahill

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