Some favor Braille over new technology

MetroWest Daily News, Monday, January 5, 2009
By Kendall Hatch/Daily News correspondent
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On the bicentennial of Louis Braille's birth yesterday, some users of his reading and writing code fear his system could be waning.

"Braille is to blind people what print is to sighted people," said Dennis Polselli, who has been blind since birth and serves as the disabilities coordinator at Framingham State College. "We would be illiterate without Braille."

Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a "cell," which have six different positions for dots.

The system was invented in 1824 by a 15-year-old Braille, who was blind, when he was enrolled at the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. It was based loosely on a communication method called "night writing," devised by Charles Babier, a captain in the French army. Night writing was used for silent communication on the battlefield, and the 12-dot positions used corresponded to sounds, not letters, as the cells used in Braille do.

Since shortly after Braille's death from tuberculosis in 1852, his system has been widely used to teach literacy to blind students, and recent advances in technology have made it even easier to print Braille text.

The numbers of blind people literate in Braille, however, are dropping significantly. State laws were recently passed mandating that schools provide Braille education. According to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, in 2008, only 15 to 20 percent of blind or visually impaired people read Braille today, as opposed to nearly half the blind population 50 years ago.

"This is a very important issue to me because I don't think people are getting the kind of Braille education they should be," said Polselli, who learned the method in the first grade. "I swear by Braille. I think it should be mandatory."

Many blind people are abandoning Braille in favor of books on tape and new technologies such as computer readers and voice recognition software. These methods can be valuable tools, but as some Braille readers point out, they don't necessarily teach users how to read and write.

"I am an avid user of Braille," said Franklin's Lisa Ostrow, who has been blind since birth. "Reading Braille is an active form of reading."

Ostrow, 42, said that without knowledge of the Braille method, blind people can't get an appropriate grasp on concepts like spelling, grammar and syntax.

"Learning spelling ultimately means you are literate," she said.

The widespread lack of Braille knowledge has spelled disaster for blind people in the workplace, as only 32 percent are employed, according to the American Foundation for the Blind in January, 2008. They also reported that 90 percent of those employed are Braille readers.

"(Reading Braille) definitely correlates with employment," said Ostrow.

Braille is also evolving to accommodate new strides in technology and new ideas, such as increasing the cell size from six to eight dots, as suggested by the Braille Authority of North America. But Polselli noted that changing the code could isolate many blind people.

"The vast majority of blind people are elders," he said, noting that many people go blind later in life, and a changing code could impede efforts to learn the method.

"There's no organization called the 'Print Authority of North America' changing print around," he said.

Elizabeth Accorsi, who is 79 years old and learned Braille in first grade at the Perkins School, agrees with Polselli.

"I'm glad I can use Braille," she said. "But they're trying to change it. I'm old. I don't want to learn it all over again.

"I think Louis had the right idea," she said.