Braille: harmonizing tradition, technology

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The aggressive one settles herself with boyish aplomb at the end of the classroom table.

She is, by her own account, a “stubborn” and “ornery” apprentice actuality at the Kansas State School for the Blind.

“A handful,” agents agree.

They’ve accustomed her a cane. She refuses to use it.

They try to advise her Braille.

“I hate that I have to learn it,” said Hannah Nistler, to whom, at age 16, the tools of blindness are uneasy reminders that, one day, in an instant, her already murky vision could go completely black.

“It’s scary,” she said. “That’s not something I’ve wanted to accept.”

What’s equally scary, say advocates for the blind, is just how few visually impaired children outside of places like this school are being instructed in Braille.

Whereas about half of them were taught the reading and writing method in the 1960s (usually at state institutions, a cheerless affair for families often forced to send their children hundreds of miles away), the number now instructed in it, with “mainstreaming” in public schools, has fallen to 12 percent.

The decline in this foundation of literacy in the blind community since the early 1800s parallels an explosion in technologies designed to help the blind access everything from novels to the Internet: “talking” computers, magnifiers, audiobooks.

Perhaps at a price.

“There is technology that can read print to you, but that is not the same as being literate,” said Chris Danielsen, spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind. “If you listen to books, you don’t learn how to spell from that. You don’t learn how to write from that. You don’t learn how to do punctuation from that.”

His organization hopes the bicentennial anniversary of Braille creator Louis Braille’s birth on Jan. 4 will raise awareness of what it’s calling a crisis in Braille literacy.

“Society would never accept a 10 percent literacy rate among sighted children,” he said. “It would be outrageous.”

Some of the outrage may need to be tempered.

Although only 12 percent of visually impaired children are learning Braille, it’s also true that only about 10 percent are completely blind.

Most of the remaining 90 percent are like Hannah and have some limited vision, or enough to use devices that make Braille less vital.

“In a lot of ways, it is better to be blind now, especially in the United States, than it has been in history,” said Reinhard Mabry, president of Alphapointe, an association that supports the blind and visually impaired in the Kansas City region. “Technology is better than it has ever been.”

Others note that one downside to great technology, however, is that it can allow mainstream educators to get off too easily.

Instead of investing in Braille teachers, who are in short supply, or committing themselves to the expense and effort of teaching Braille, too many school districts convince parents that their visually impaired children can get by primarily using talking computers and the like.

A talking computer, Braille proponents say, won’t read your shopping list in the aisle of a grocery store. It won’t select your floor in an elevator. And what happens when the power lines go down?

“I don’t know anyone who thinks the trend away from Braille is a good one,” said Gary Mudd at the Kentucky-based American Printing House for the Blind.