Braille literacy flags, even as technology makes it more urgent

Consistent braille and computer instruction at Perkins changed his academic future, he says. As a dean's list student at Keene State College where he will be junior this fall, Yerardi reads textbooks using a PAC Mate personal digital assistant with audio instruction and a refreshable braille display. He plans to teach technology to the blind after he graduates in 2009.

Technology brings braille to PDAs

The fusion of braille and technology presents an intriguing challenge to the blind community. Some worry that the growing emphasis to modernize will eliminate braille, but this worry is not evident at the Carroll Center for the Blind in Newton, Mass.

On the last Friday of June, three collegiate students gathered in a small classroom with Brian Charlson, Carroll's vice president of computer training.

Mr. Charlson praises the technological advances he's seen during the past decades. Gone are the days when students had to manually make dot combinations with styluses or Perkins Braillers, the common braille typewriter. Now students can electronically scan pages and translate them to braille with Duxbury translation software. They can even print the pages with braille embossers. Refreshable braille displays with changing dot combinations, sleek voice recorders, and the JAWS computer screen-reading program are just a few options available for blind students.

Charlson points to large volumes of braille books in his office shelves. The books are expensive to produce because of the thick paper and size requirements, he says. Unlike print, braille cannot be reduced in size.

So when the Hogwarts aficionados leave the Midnight Madness party early Saturday morning, they each will be toting the 10 braille volumes that make up Potter's final adventures in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Each set weighs 12 pounds and costs about $62 to produce, although the NBP will charge the same price sighted readers will pay for the book in an effort to promote parity.

"When everybody talks about technology killing braille, it's the other way around," Charlson says of refreshable braille displays. "Technology is growing braille, because braille is no longer an issue of size. It's still an issue of expense, though."

All three students in Charlson's class say their public school districts funded their Carroll technology class. All know braille, and all have expensive refreshable braille personal digital assistants. And Charlson says each pupil is an example of how such opportunities are "exclusively" available for students or the employed. He reiterates that about 70 percent of the blind population is unemployed and will not have access to such expensive technology.

Renn Bailey of Albuquerque, N.M., enrolled in Charlson's class to prepare for his freshman year at the University of New Mexico. The New Mexico Commission for the Blind provided his BrailleNote – a note-taking device with refreshable braille display and audio instruction. The latest version sells for about $6,000.

"I had a social studies book in audio once, and it was terrible," he says of his preference for reading rather than listening.

Mr. Bailey's classmate Danielle Senick of Norwich, Conn., says she read her first braille book at age 5. Ironically, the book was about the man who changed blind literacy and opened the door to her education.

"I remember sitting out on the porch at this family gathering and everyone was like, 'Read us a book,' " says Ms. Senick, a soon-to-be freshman at Curry College in Milton, Mass. "So I read them this book about Louis Braille. I've used braille a lot ... for pleasure, for education. I just feel I'd be lost if I didn't know how to read it."

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