Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
@127, being in the US and learning grade 2 literary braille code as a kid, the only symbol I was made aware of was dots 4-6. At first I was told this indicated italics. But later, I was told this was a catch-all symbol for any special type i.e. bold, italics, underline etc.
Even with the existence of such a symbol, skimming for bold text and the like isn't one of those things I would consider easy to do, without reading everything linearly and looking for it. When I asked my vision support teacher if sighted people can skim for that text without reading every word, she said yes. It was just another thing I felt I had to come to terms with, given my low self-confidence about my blindness.
I won't touch on how much braille helps you with formatting because I don't really know. By the time I started having to care about that, I was transitioning to the computer, where immediate access to braille, especially my own, wasn't an easy option for me as I didn't always have a braille display handy. Besides, speech and typing on a qwerty keyboard felt more natural for me. I admit I could've used my Braille Note more to learn formatting, but since the instructors saw I could follow well enough with just speech, nobody made a big issue of it. And at the time, I didn't think you could even convey formatting with braille anyway, so I didn't see the point of trying.
To this day, I still don't quite get bold, italics and underline. I know they exist and that braille might accommodate them, but I never quite understood what they are or how useful they are, other than perhaps drawing your attention briefly to text. I guess that bold makes the text larger, underline has a line under it? Italics I have no idea, and then you get into different fonts, sizes, indents, hanging indents, and while some of them make sense, my brain still doesn't get how I could personally find them useful. To me, they feel like things which mainly benefit the sighted, and can only be approximated in the blind world.
I'm good with spelling and basic word usage, though. That is something braille helped me out with, so I will agree that braille should be learned by every blind student. You don't get literacy without it. Ever since I stopped reading braille as much as I used to, my spelling has tanked. I remember old words well but new words are considerably harder for me to remember, and most of the time I have to imagine the word in braille a hundred times or come up with a crazy mnemonic, which I almost never had to do before.
And math braille I was pretty good with too. Well at least nemeth code. I haven't needed math braille since UEB became a thing though, so I'd have to catch up. I feel a little bad for some of the kids caught in the transition period, having to juggle two braille codes at the same time while trying to learn algebra and stuff. Maybe it's not that bad, but I was terrible at the advanced math I had to take. That's one reason I wasn't in support of changing the system at first, but I know there are advantages. Hey, maybe UEB has better support for bold/italic/underline? So I'll at least know what that darned special symbol actually means, instead of saying "there's that weird 4-6 again..."
I should go look.
Edit: fix typos.
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