Re: Braille: do you guys still use it in this digitalized world?
I'm kind of an odd one I suppose. Tl,dr: I believe every blind child should be fluent in braille literacy. That said, I believe it is important for blind youth, especially when nearing adulthood, to develop their own perspective, without pressure, on how much they feel they need braille in their day-to-day lives. At the end of the day, braille is a blind person's tool. There's no getting around it. It's a damn useful tool, and accomplishes many of the same things print does for the sighted, but the differences between braille and print are far from negligible in my opinion, simply because there's no way to make the two systems compatible with one another without a third party. Sometimes that third party is a transcriber, but for the most part, technology is serving that third party role extraordinarily well these days.
You could argue that braille is not really necessary with the technology we have. To be honest, sighted people are struggling with the same problems; I have heard that children no longer learn cursive writing or how to read a clock face. Why? Because analog clocks are antiquated, and nobody uses cursive anymore. Aside from those things being old school, I think technology is just providing easier alternatives. Some people find that incredibly sad, some people aren't bothered by it. I'm in the middle somewhere, able to understand both sides. I'm not here to find happy compromises for all the world's problems, so I'll take a back seat and let other people sort out what is or is not needed in 2020.
My own personal story:
I learned braille really well in school, but I haven't used braille much in almost 8 years. I can still read and write it well though.
The reason I ultimately stopped using braille regularly was that I was tired of dealing with it. I've never liked the fact that I am blind, and braille was just one more thing I felt made me different.
What really clenched it for me was an incident a month or so into my seventh grade year. My English teacher asked me if I could write capital letters, because I forgot to capitalize words on a spelling test. She wasn't being rude or anything, she legit was concerned that my device wasn't advanced enough to do it. Some people might have been appalled; this would be an insult on their intelligence. I don't appall easily though. I knew it was an honest question, and it made me sad. It made me feel like I came from a primitive culture with poor educational standards. I don't hold it against her for asking at all... It just sent me on a thought train which added to my dissatisfaction with my blindness.
Then there was the incident where a teacher accidentally gave my braille transcriber a test with the answer key, which resulted in me having to take the test late in order for the situation to be sorted out. Not to mention the multiple incidents where my hard copy braille was not very readable due to me erasing stuff... so I'd have to tell the transcriber what I wrote. It frustrated me, since I never felt directly responsible for my work. I always had to go through someone to translate my blind output to sighted input.
When I started getting good at computers, I went through a phase where I was good at certian things on the computer, and other things on the note taker. Anything involving the Internet was a computer task, while anything involving writing was a note taker task. I had to go through braille to text translation which wasn't always perfect. More than once I'd go back and forth between note taker and computer, and I found it irritating. I just wanted to feel like I was fitting in with my peers. Maybe I was just looking for an escape from blindness.
As it turns out, I sort of got my wish soon after high school. During my first few months of college, my note taker crashed on me very unexpectedly. It would take weeks to fix. I did have a nice laptop at the time, though I didn't use it much. But now I had little choice but to make it work.
Funny thing, the laptop actually worked out as well as I could've hoped. I kept using it even when the note taker came back, which was a good thing because it crashed again in a few months. The laptop wasn't void of problems, but when I did have issues with it, I had many options to get it fixed. I never went a day without it... at worst, I had to call someone from the IT department to come in and get it booted up for me, which he was able to do in less than 2 hours. Another time they helped me over the phone to get reconnected to the wifi, and guided me through a procedure with ipconfig. Within 10 minutes I was on. It was, in a word, awesome. It was such a liberating feeling to do things the way any other sighted person with a laptop would.
I felt that people around me were happy to know I could use the stuff they could use. Professors were put at ease when they saw I was able to use Blackboard, send e-mails etc. just like any other student who had a laptop. I did take tests at a special testing center which could provide extra accommodations. AT first this bothered me, but I soon learned that many of my sighted friends went there. I don't know exactly why they did, but they certainly were not blind, and didn't have some severe learning disability, so if they could go, I could too. In the end, I felt like my blindness could afford to sit in the second row instead of being at center stage demanding attention.
With that said, I do still use braille. I use it all the time on my phone, since it's faster than touch typing on the onscreen keyboard. I know I should be reading braille more too, since my spelling and to some extent, punctuation use, was drastically better when I used braille. I can remember most if not all the words I read in braille, but if I try to learn a new word without braille, it just doesn't stick very well. The sound of the word does, the meaning often does particularly if I find a simple definition I understand, but the spelling just doesn't sink in as easily.
I am fully convinced that the tactile and visual parts of the brain just have more of an aptitude for remembering things like how words look, or in our case, how they feel. Hearing things letter by letter will tell you a lot, but it won't stick in the same way that feeling a word or looking at it visually will. I think it also depends on how our brains are wired; I for instance am only good at learning auditorily if I am trying to memorize musical notes, sounds, or other non-literary objects. As soon as you introduce words, numbers etc. my brain is trying to relate them to something tactile. In my case, when I want to remember how a word is spelled, I either imagine it in braille, imagine my fingers on a computer keyboard, or some bizarre combination of the two. Still, new words and spellings don't stick for me nearly as well as they used to, and I am pretty solidly convinced this is because I am no longer reading braille regularly. I shutter to think how bad my spelling would be if I never learned braille... As much as I kinda hated having to use it, it is a letter-by-letter representation of the spoken word, which you don't get by reading audio books, listening to people talk, or using your favorite synthetic voice to read your documents.
Here's an interesting question/challenge. Have you ever done unusual things with braille? My unusual thing was typing braille with one hand. Not on a Perkins brailler, but on a note taker or other braille keyboard where the keys don't travel so much. I used to do it when I wanted to make a digital version of a hard copy paper. One time one of my vision teachers caught me doing this, reading with my right hand while typing with the left, (I read primarily with the right hand btw), and they seemed surprised. It was one of those adolescent things I could have fun with, at any rate, and I found uses for it lol
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