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| Learning: A child is shown how to use the braille reading system. Only 12 percent of legally blind children in the United States can
read braille, down from almost 50 percent in the 1960s. Desmond Boylan/Reuters |
Braille literacy flags, even as technology makes it more urgent
Only 12 percent of legally blind children in the US can read braille.
from the July 19, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Trials in seeking better teaching in schools
Stephen Yerardi, class president of Perkins's 2004 graduating high school class, soberly recalls his family's fight for braille education in the New Hampshire public school system when he was 9. He says teachers suggested a "life-skills program" with no academic instruction and no hope for college.
"I hated going to school," Mr. Yerardi says by phone. "The teachers didn't really understand how to teach me, and they were kind of negative toward me."
Yerardi says he received braille instruction just twice a week – significantly too little time, he says – from a teacher who mistakenly reversed dot combinations.
"They had no experience teaching a blind student," he says. "I was the only person with a physical disability in nine towns."
At age 13, Yerardi says school system administrators paid for his instruction at Perkins after coming to the conclusion that they could not provide adequate resources.
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.
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