here is a speech from a friend who is also an accomplished elementary school teacher on the use of braille, hope you enjoy. Since she had made it public and it was so good, I would think its really fitting to include it in here: P.d. I really enjoy reading braille books. Just as she says, the experience is almost personalized, unique, more intimate.
CTEBVI Speech
4-12-19
Caitlin Hernandez
The first sentence I ever read aloud in braille without help—from Patterns, of course—was "I can go." I remember the small, musty closet of a room where I received braille instruction, and I think I remember the cheers of my mom and teachers when I read that sentence. But aside from that, I don't really remember learning braille. I feel as though I was always reading, writing, thinking in, and loving braille. And I was fascinated by it, too—by its singularly complex simplicity. Because braille is simple, in a way. It's only six dots. And yet, it's amazingly intricate, multi-faceted, ingenious. To those of us who read it, use it, rely on it, it's everything.
In my elementary school library, amid the innumerable print books, there were two long shelves of braille books. It doesn't sound like a lot, and it wasn't. But in my day, before Kindle and BookShare and all the rest enabled blind people to have, literally, almost every book at our fingertips, book-hungry blind kids like me read anything and everything we could get our eager hands on.
One of the books—a skinnier one—was a biography of Louis Braille, written, for children, by Margaret Davidson. As a seven-year-old, I was astounded to learn that the inventor of braille had been a fifteen-year-old blind boy. Before braille, blind children, if they were literate at all, read raised print—a process which was cumbersome and tedious, if not impossible.
The book explained that, though Louis Braille's young, blind peers loved the code and mastered it immediately, the sighted adults in power resisted it ... loudly. They didn't want change, didn't want to be tasked with learning something new.
Louis and his friends continued using the new code in secret. The adults banned it, forbade it, confiscated the children's tools so they couldn't punch the dots. When none of that worked, the adults would strike the offending boys across the hands. This appalled me so much that I remember it years later. Even at seven, I was furious that these sighted teachers thought they knew better than blind people what was best for us. How in the world could they? I shuddered to think what my life—what all blind people's lives—would be like if Louis Braille and his friends had given up, had let those teachers tell them what was and wasn't best for them.
Reading and rereading that Louis Braille book, so many times that the braille dots changed from new and crisp to soft and well-worn, I remember being grateful, not just for the braille code, but for my own braille and mobility teachers. They listened to me, valued my autonomy and feelings, respected my opinions about tools and strategies which did and didn't benefit me. Many blind students, I knew, weren't half so lucky.
I think about this often, now, as I, a teacher who's been totally blind since birth, instruct sighted, elementary-aged, special-education students with various disabilities. It's easy to forget, until I know them well, that many of my students, particularly those who struggle with reading and auditory processing, require a high amount of visual input. While I build my life—my perceptions of the world—out of words, written and spoken, most of my kids need to see things. This is an example of what my especially savvy and woke disabled friends call "conflicting access needs."
My first year of teaching, students were forever asking, "Can you put this on the board, Miss H?" One fifth-grader once famously told me, "The more you try to explain math, the less I understand it."
These days, we meet in the middle. Unifix cubes are our best friends. The kids can see them, I can touch them, and we can all think with them. I even have a few students who like to close their eyes while they use the cubes; it helps them concentrate. Kids take turns being scribes, writing the group's shared findings on the whiteboard as we all contribute thoughts, questions, and ideas for next steps. I sit by, copying in braille—partly for my own records, partly to ensure I'm following them.
We can never know what does or doesn't work for another learner. And it's crucial that we take others' learning styles into consideration, that we don't dismiss their methods just because they require extra effort for us to master. In addition to braille itself—enough of a gift on its own—that's the lesson Louis Braille taught me.
There's a lot of talk, these days, about the intersection between technology and braille. Some people think that, with talking phones, screenreading and OCR software, accessible GPS, and all the rest, braille will become obsolete. I, of course, adamantly disagree. My most clear-cut argument is that, if they never read braille, blind and visually impaired people won't know how to spell or punctuate. But, more than that, it's often just a preference.
Emerging braille technology and I grew up alongside one another. Throughout my childhood, my parents, braille teachers, and braillists scrambled to find and create enough braille books to keep my fingers and mind engaged. I liked audiobooks, but I craved braille. I loved reading aloud, loved the freedom of creating characters' voices in my head as their words glided beneath my fingers. I loved cuddling up with a big braille book and turning the pages.
Whenever we went out anywhere as a family, I'd carry one volume of braille, and someone else would haul the next, ready for the moment when the first volume would end, inevitably on a cliffhanger, and I'd desperately need the next. I always liked to read braille cross-legged, bracing the sides of the big book against my knees, which I angled inward. My family would often find chairs in stores, so I could sit and read and not bother them about "When are we leaving?" and "What are you staring at now?" But my favorite reading spots were the open spaces beneath clothing racks. I'd snuggle cozily in among the jackets and shirts and jeans, reading to my heart's content until some unsuspecting shopper pulled back a swath of clothes, saw me, and gasped in surprise.
Often, I read books far above my grade level, simply because, back then, there weren't enough children's books to occupy me. If I'd had today's tech as a child, I could and would have read every single book my friends were reading. But those books were rarely available in braille. My sighted sister, friends, and cousin often read those to me, so I'd know what the cool kids were talking about at the water cooler.
When I received my first BrailleNote in sixth grade, 2001, I felt as though the entire world had opened. I had access to more books than I could ever possibly read. For the first time, I could write stories and keep a journal and do homework on the go. I no longer had to drag around a Perkins brailler, a laptop, or quite so many textbooks.
Most of us are aware that the vast majority of blind people who are employed use braille. Being employed, of course, isn't everyone's goal, nor is it the only indicator of success and happiness. But there's no question that many blind people default to braille for efficiency, for maximum productivity. I write my lesson plans, track students' levels and progress, keep records, and correspond with parents and colleagues in braille, on my BrailleNote. My calendar, phonebook, address book, passwords, endless to-do lists ... all in braille. People are constantly telling me there are apps for things, and I just scoff, "Whatever ... they're not in braille—I don't want them."
I draft and edit my novels entirely in braille, too. Though I began learning to type on the computer at age six, I always insisted on writing creatively in braille, much to the chagrin of my poor VI teachers who had to interline pages after pages of my melodramatic nonfiction and my Rugrats and Arthur fanfiction.
Once, in high school, when my BrailleNote was being repaired, I had to update my infamous LiveJournal blog on the computer instead of on the BrailleNote. My readership dropped astronomically.
"Your entries are so boring this week," I remember one commenter complaining. "When does your BrailleNote come back? You write better with that."
It goes without saying that I wrote this whole speech in braille.
Of course, blind people aren't a monolith ... and there are certainly many tasks which I, and others, complete with screenreaders, iDevices, audio, or a combination thereof. But the marriage of braille and technology is, for many blind folks, the miracle that enables us to keep pace in a sighted world, which always seems to be one step—one automatic iOS update, if you will—ahead of us.
People claim that braille fosters independence, enables "blind kind," as I call us, to compete with the sighted. On the surface, I agree with this. After all, I use braille just about every moment of my work day, and for most of the moments outside it. But I think many people underestimate the unique power braille has to unite us, to bring blind and sighted people together. Often, to me, it seems like the initial gateway between our worlds.
Teachers in Louis Braille's time may not have wanted to bother learning a code of tiny raised dots, but my sighted third and fourth graders certainly do. Not a day goes by when tiny fingers don't creep onto my braille display beside mine, or grab at the braille charm dangling from my cane.
Every once in a while, during free time, a kid will snag a braille volume of our district's math curriculum, flip to a page at random, plunk it in front of me, and demand that I read aloud. When I oblige, there's always some level of awe—not because I can read braille, or even because I read it quickly, but because, when you stop to think about it, braille itself is miraculous.
"It's just dots," students will gasp, running wondering fingers over the pages. "How do they make so many words?"
My kids often beg me to teach them braille. There aren't enough hours in the day, of course, especially for a skill that's not tied to either an IEP goal or the oh-so-delightful common core. But I try to find time to guide their fingers along a print/braille alphabet card, to explain how the pattern works, to braille their name.
Throughout my life, I've leaned into the magic of sharing braille with my sighted people. One of my sighted friends from elementary school is now a braille teacher in San Diego. A college friend mastered enough braille—and math braille, too—to make diagrams and tutor me in statistics. She used to scotch-tape brailled notes over the keyhole of my apartment door, and just last week, for my birthday, she wrote "happy birthday" on my Facebook timeline, not in English, but by typing, "1-2-3, 1, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-3-4-5-6; 1-2, 1-4-5, 1, 1-3-4-5-6."
I'm sure some of you are familiar with the admittedly limited, gendered, and heteronormative concept of "the five love languages." Despite its faults, I've always been enamored with it. The idea is that there are five primary ways in which people demonstrate love—spending quality time, giving gifts, sharing affirming words, performing acts of service, and physically touching. Most of us, on some level, appreciate and desire all these things. But each of us, if subconsciously, are said to respond to and crave one expression—one love language—above all the others.
According to the online quiz, I'm an almost perfect tie between "quality time" and "physical touch." But sometimes, when I talk to people about love languages, I say, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, that my true love language is braille.
Years later, I'll remember the card a sighted person brailled, laboriously, letter by letter, with a cheat-sheet. I'll keep and constantly wear the T-shirt someone puffy-painted in braille. I'll tell others about the online service someone used to have their greeting brailled and snail-mailed to me. I felt, more than knew, how much my braille teachers cared about my education when they hand-brailled worksheets last-minute, when they took my stories home to finish translating them into print, when they built braille-labeled tactile models for geometry with any materials that came to hand. In first grade, a sighted classmate thought to ask my classroom teacher, "How will Caitlin read her valentines? Shouldn't somebody braille them for her?" My braille teacher and one-to-one aide divided my cards between them, brailled them the night before, and, I hope, were rewarded by my incredulous delight. There's a giddy, thrilling little heart-leap you can only truly know if you've been handed something you expect not to be able to read, only to realize that someone thought to change that. Braille, if I dare to pun, adds that extra touch in a way nothing else can.
The tough thing about braille—the reason I think many people, of all ages and with varying levels of vision, struggle with it—is that, at first, it takes time. I'm lucky to have learned braille young, to have only the vaguest recollection of tired, achy fingers and the irritated impatience common among beginners. I loved books, and I wanted to read—that was enough incentive for me to persevere with braille.
On some level, I think many congenitally blind children intuitively understand that, for us, things almost always take longer. I tell my colleagues, when they comment on my unusually high level of patience, that blindness teaches us how to wait: for explanations and descriptions, for things to be made accessible. For me, waiting to be a fast reader—having to work at it—seemed natural. But for many people, particularly adults and older children, the trail to braille efficiency is slow and painful.
I have a writer friend, Leona Godin, who lives in Colorado. She was born visually impaired and is now totally blind. She's in her forties—"a real adult," as I affectionately call her. She, in turn, refers to me as "her pet millennial." Leona's writing a book about the history of blindness in literature, for which she recently landed a fancy book deal. In part because she wants to narrate her own audiobook, but also because she's a fierce lover of books who misses physically turning pages, she's making a concerted effort to become a strong braille reader.
I, like many people, always assumed braille was next to impossible for newly-blind adults to learn. We all hear so much about how children, with their still-spongy brains, soak up languages significantly better than adults. Leona, in researching her book, learned that, in actuality, the areas of the brain reserved for sight can easily be repurposed for touch ... and not just in young children.
Leona reads braille for an hour a day, hoping that, by the time her book comes out, her fluency will be greatly improved. I'm proud of and excited for her. As it happens, she and I will meet in person for the first time a week from tonight. I promised to braille her a nice, long letter to read on her flight home.
As with many things, braille benefits people most when they stick with it. I remember, in fifth grade, one of my sighted friends saying, "You read pretty well, but there's no way fingers can ever read as fast as eyes." I, of course, interpreted this as a challenge. Many blind people only become rapid braille readers with the introduction of braille displays and notetakers—yet more proof that the convergence of braille and technology is a win-win. But there is, I think, a special magic in turning braille pages, in holding an enormous braille volume and realizing, with pride, that your fingers read every word, touched every dot. As I often brag to sighted people, there's no skimming in braille. When I tell you I read something, I really read it, considered it. I constantly notice typos my sighted counterparts miss. Eyes auto-correct, see only the edges of words and fill in the blanks in a way discerning fingers simply refuse to do. My spelling, I know, is also improved by braille. I spell-check in my head by writing words in contracted braille as I type in qwerty.
It's funny, in a way, that sighted people like to praise blind people for the most mundane, uninteresting things we do. Walking around unassisted. Walking out the door looking presentable. Walking out the door at all. Getting up in the morning at all. Few people bother to be impressed by the things we use and learn that actually require significant knowledge, incredibly deep understanding, and tremendous focus. And patience, of course. We never get kudos for our patience—not just with tech, but with answering people's endless, monotonous questions, dealing with their discomfort and ignorance, just existing in the world. But it continues to be strange to me that, though they love the tech, most sighted people have no idea how trying and wearing it can be, even for a blind person who's accustomed to dealing with it. With one update, an app can become entirely different and largely inaccessible, and we have to waste precious time re-learning, reorienting, and, if we're feeling noble, writing to the creators to inform them that they've irreparably destroyed accessibility once again. We have to master countless pieces of technology. To make things work, we need numerous programs, across many devices, screenreaders, browsers, and even operating systems.
In my day, you wrote an essay and handed it in. Sometimes I touch-typed it, sometimes I brailled it, but always, it was simple. Nowadays, there's Google Docs and Drive and Classroom and Slides, Dropbox and the Cloud, ChromeBooks and braille notetakers and computers and iDevices, the web version and mobile version and app version of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
I'm grateful for tech—I really am—but I'm also so grateful not to be a blind or disabled student right now. Because it's beyond difficult. Still—note the blind pun—there's a bright side. Having to work so hard at braille and tech and mobility and all the rest equips blind and VI folks with so many wonderful skills and qualities that our sighted peers rarely possess at our level. Tenacity, creativity, ingenuity, interdependence, self-advocacy. Those things serve us in amazing stead, forever.
As a blind teacher, I often can't access the technology used by my sighted students. I can't read print over their shoulders. I can't understand all the visual aspects of their math. In a way, I understand the plight faced by those of you educators who, while sighted yourselves, are guiding your blind students through a world of tech, braille, and experiences which you're only partially able to understand. You and I are both visitors in worlds that aren't ours, that won't ever entirely be ours. Just as you may not know what it's like to be blind, I don't know what it's like to be dyslexic, or autistic, or learning-disabled. And it's for this reason that I bring us back to Louis Braille, to the push-back he received when he first created braille. We have to push back, too—not against innovation, but against that paternalistic attitude of "You don't need that ... you already have something that works ... be grateful you have anything at all ... don't make a fuss ... I know what you need better than you do."
As teachers—as humans—it does us so much more good to listen than to talk. The temptation, for many teachers, is to fix: to say, "Here's what you need. I learned about this—I know." Really, though, we need to say, "Talk to me. Tell me what you need. How do you learn? What's working? What's not? Tell me what makes you feel frustrated and what makes you feel successful. We'll figure this out together."
That last part, I think, is the most important. It's true that we all have different experiences, different learning styles, different strengths and struggles, different lives. But just as old-school braille is made more magical when inbined with new-school tech, so the old-school wisdom of us teachers does its best work when we're listening—really, truly listening to and hearing—our kids. Meeting them where they are, supporting them through trials and triumphs, truly being receptive to what they want and need—that's where the magic happens.
And—it goes without saying—never, ever smack a blind kid across the hands ... unless you want to feel a cane against your shins.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…