It is an excellent article except that it fails to mention the attitude of
western world in general and the United States in particular towards brail
literacy which considers teaching brail to visually challenged students is
undesirable. No wonder, 90% of the American visually challenged lack the
ability to read and write in brail. This attitude does get tied to the
general tendency of considering brail script as hierarchically inferior to
the normal script. Just to illustrate this, I met people at the NFB
convention who were forced to learn normal script despite the fact that
their vision was not enough to retain it. In fact it was so bad that many
actually ended-up loosing little vision they had because of the constant
exposure to CC TV and other similar tools.
Vetri.
----- Original Message -----
From: "SC Vashishth" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 3:09 AM
Subject: [AI] For the Blind, digital misgivings
FYI from mydigitalfc
For the blind, digital misgivings
By RACHEL AVIV Jan 03 2010
At 4 o’clock each morning, Laura J. Sloate begins her daily reading. She
calls a phone service that reads newspapers aloud in a synthetic voice, and
she listens to The Wall Street Journal at 300 words a minute, which is
nearly twice the average pace of speech. Later, an assistant reads The
Financial Times to her while she uses her computer’s text-tospeech system to
play The Economist aloud. She devotes one ear to the paper and the other to
the magazine.
The managing director of a Wall Street investment management firm, Ms.
Sloate has been blind since age 6, and although she reads constantly, poring
over the news and economic reports for several hours every morning, she does
not use Braille. ‘‘Knowledge goes from my ears to my brain, not from my
finger to my brain,’’ she said. As a child she learned how the letters of
the alphabet sounded, not how they appeared or felt on the page. She does
not think of a comma in terms of its written form but rather as ‘‘a stop on
the way before continuing.’’ This, she said, is the future of reading for
the blind.
‘‘Literacy evolves,’’ she said. ‘‘When Braille was invented, in the 19th
century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time,
blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.’’ Ms.
Sloate regrets not having spent more time learning to spell in her youth,
but she said she thinks that using Braille would only have isolated her from
her sighted peers. ‘‘It’s an arcane means of communication, which for the
most part should be abolished,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s just not needed today.’’
Braille books are expensive and cumbersome, requiring reams of thick,
oversize paper. The National Braille Press, an 83-year-old publishing house
in Boston, printed the Harry Potter series on its Heidelberg cylinder; the
final product was 56 volumes, each nearly a foot, or 30 centimeters, tall.
Because a single textbook can cost more than $1,000 and there is a shortage
of Braille teachers in public schools, visually impaired students often read
using MP3 players, audiobooks and computerscreen- reading software.
A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an
advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that fewer than 10 percent of the
1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. About half of all blind
children learned Braille in the 1950s, but today that number is as low as 1
in 10, according to the report.
For much of the past century, blind children attended residential
institutions where they learned to read by touching the words. Today,
visually impaired children can be well versed in literature without knowing
howto read; computerscreen- reading software will even break down each word
and read the individual letters aloud. Literacy has become much harder to
define, even for educators.
‘‘If all you have in the world is what you hear people say, then your mind
is limited,’’ said Darrell Shandrow, who runs a blog called Blind Access
Journal.
‘‘You need written symbols to organize your mind. If you can’t feel or see
the word, what does it mean? The substance is gone.’’ Like many Braille
readers, Mr. Shandrow says that new computers, which form a single line of
Braille cells at a time, will revive the code of bumps, but these devices
are still extremely costly and not yet widely used. He views the decline in
Braille literacy as a sign of regression, not progress.
‘‘This is like going back to the 1400s, before Gutenberg’s printing press
came on the scene,’’ he said. ‘‘Only the scholars and monks knew how to read
and write. And then there were the illiterate masses, the peasants.’’ Until
the 19th century, blind people were confined to an oral culture. Some tried
to read letters carved in wood or wax, formed by wire or outlined in felt
with pins. Dissatisfied with such makeshift methods, Louis Braille, a
student at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, began studying a
cipher language of bumps, called night writing, developed by a French Army
officer so soldiers could send messages in the dark.
Braille modified the code so that it could be read more efficiently — each
letter or punctuation symbol is represented by a pattern of one to six dots
on amatrix of three rows and two columns — and added abbreviations for
commonly used words like ‘‘knowledge,’’ ‘‘people’’ and ‘‘Lord.’’ Learning to
read is so entwined in the normal course of children’s development that it
is easy to assume that our brains are naturally wired for print literacy.
But humans have been reading for less than 6,000 years and literacy has been
widespread for no more than a century and a half. The activity of reading
itself alters the anatomy of the brain.
In a report released in 2009 in the journal Nature, the neuroscientist
Manuel Carreiras studied illiterate former guerrillas in Colombia who, after
years of combat, had abandoned their weapons, left the jungle and rejoined
civilization.
Mr. Carreiras compared 20 adults who had recently completed a literacy
program with 22 people who had not yet begun it.
In M.R.I. scans of their brains, the newly literate subjects showed more
gray matter in their angular gyri, an area crucial for language processing,
and more white matter in part of the corpus callosum, which links the two
hemispheres.
Our definition of a literate society inevitably shifts as our tools for
reading and writing evolve, but the brief history of literacy for blind
people makes the prospect of change particularly fraught.
Since the 1820s when the Braille system was invented — so that blind people
would no longer be ‘‘despised or patronized by condescending sighted
people,’’ as the inventor put it — there has always been, among blind
people, a political and even moral dimension to learning to read. Braille is
viewed by many as a mark of independence, a sign that blind people have
moved away from an oral culture seen as primitive and isolating.
In recent years, however, this narrative has been complicated.
Schoolchildren in developed countries, like the United States and Britain,
are now thought to have lower Braille literacy than those in developing
ones, like Indonesia and Botswana, where there are few alternatives to
Braille. Tim Connell, the managing director of an assistivetechnology
company in Australia, said that he had heard this described as ‘‘one of the
advantages of being poor.’’ Braille readers do not deny that new reading
technology has been transformative, but Braille looms so large in the
mythology of blindness that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status.
Those who have residual vision and still try to read print — very slowly or
by holding the page an inch or two from their faces — are generally frowned
upon by the National Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the
leader of a civil rights movement for the blind.
Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious reader, compares Louis Braille with
Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention for the federation, held in
Detroit last July, the mantra of ‘‘listening is not literacy’’ was repeated
everywhere, from panels on the Braille crisis to conversations among
middle-school girls. Horror stories circulating around the convention
featured children who did not know what a paragraph was or why some letters
are capitalized or that ‘‘happily ever after’’ was made up of three separate
words.
Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of
the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Bill Clinton and
relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his
lack of reading skills.
‘‘I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn’t until two months ago that I
realized that ‘dissent,’ to disagree, is different than ‘descent,’ to lower
something,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m functionally illiterate.
People say, ‘Oh, no, you’re not.’ Yes, I am. I’m sorry about it, but I’m not
embarrassed to admit it.’’ While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of
New York, David A. Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to
achieve without the help of Braille, their success requires accommodations
that many cannot afford.
Like Ms. Sloate, Mr. Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members
select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice
mail every morning.
Mr. Paterson called himself ‘‘overassimilated’’ and said that as a child, he
had been ‘‘mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message that
I’m not really supposed to be blind.’’ Among people with fewer resources,
Braille readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it is more
plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather than
manual labor.
A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who
learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as
those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited
with pride, so much so that those who did not know Braille were sometimes
made to feel like outsiders.
‘‘There is definitely a sense of peer pressure from the older guard,’’ said
James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using text-to-speech software. ‘‘If we
could live in our own little Braille world, then that’d be perfect,’’ he
added. ‘‘But we live in a visual world.’’ When deaf people began getting
cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in the deaf community felt
betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think of the disability in a
new way — as an identity and a culture. Technology has changed the nature of
many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also complicating people’s sense
of what is physically natural, because bodies can so often be tweaked until
‘‘fixed.’’ Arielle Silverman, a graduate student at the convention who has
been blind since birth, said that if she had the choice to have vision, she
was not sure she would take it. Recently she purchased a pocket-size reading
machine that takes photographs of text and then reads the words aloud, and
she said she thought of vision like that, as ‘‘just another piece of
technology.’’ The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history
of reading, with the scope of the disability — the extent to which you are
viewed as ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent—determined largely
by your ability to gain access to the printed word. For 150 years, Braille
books were designed to function as much as possible like print books.
But now the computer has essentially done away with the limits of form,
because information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through
sound or touch.
For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has been
relatively subtle, but for many blind people, the shift to computerized
speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment.
In grappling with what has been lost, several federation members recite
various takes on the classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What
is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air.
--
Warm regards,
Subhash Chandra Vashishth
Mobile: +91 (11) 9811125521
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