Re: When is the last time anyone has read a braille book?
I'm with Dark. I don't spend much time around braille anymore save to read to my children from books that contain both braille and print as well as images for their convenience, given that braille is vastly limited by its size and expensive to get your hands on regardless of what kind of braille it is or what it's for. The books I read them are actually overlays of their print counterparts and cost more because of it. Where I might be able to obtain the print editions of children's books suitable for ages 1 to 5 for no more than 5 dollars because they are so small, obtaining them in braille can cost anywhere upwards of 10 dollars, sometimes as much as 30.
then there's size. I have a new international version of the bible that spans a total of 36 volumes which is absolutely and entirely ridiculous, since sighted people can carry one around with them wherever they go. for that reason, and while it does make me sad to say it
given that I do actually believe in reading braille, I can't quite advocate for making it a primary source of reading. It should stick around since I believe more people benefit from using it to learn how to spell and the like, since I don't know of a narrated story where the narrator just, decided they were going to read the whole thing out one letter at a time, and words such as acquiescence, while not often used, probably because people are generally not complacent with being acquiescent and prefer to use words they are much more comfortable with, can be tricky to spell unless you go and look them up specifically.
And this is where braille, I believe, is key to reading. While yes, a sighted person might miss the speling of a word owing to the similarity of shape and size, it's those shapes and sizes that, when consistently applied to the mind on a regular basis become synonymous with something and allow one to remember what these belong to and bet
ter memorize. I've seen countless teachers employ this tactic with success, atempting to give students an image to associate with the correct answer so that the student might remember it when the test comes up. I believe that when learned and applied correctly, braille automatically provides said shapes in a tactile manner for the blind. If instead of thinking of fence as the letter f, dots five and six, then hte letter e, we actually associate dots five and six followed by an e as e n c e, in essence remembering what it actually is, we're less likely to misspell it and or assume it has an s, which a speech synth like eloquence is more than likely to read the same exact way. There are things that screen readers teach you to do, bad habits that you acquire as the result of listening to their synthesised speech that you might not otherwise do. There is a band named Lunarsea. if you're reading that with eloquence, you probably haven�
39;t already figured out that the words lunar and sea have been joined together to form this name. I'm sure people might be able to think up other things their speech synths beautifully screw up, but the point remains the same.
To conclude, while I'm sad that braille doesn't do us justice in reading and is in essence considered somewhat antiquated and obsolete, I do believe that those who use it correctly and routinely, particularly through the early years of their lives, gleam and gain a life time of benefits.
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