A Comment for Consideration
Friday 23 July 2010
The following was published to highlight the extraordinary need and importance of being literate – able to read and write – for those with impaired vision or blindness.
The article was compiled by Natalie Craig (Sunday 20 June 2010, The Sunday Age).
Rebecca Maxwell cannot imagine life without Braille. She lost her sight to meningitis as a baby, and at five went to a blind school in Adelaide where she learnt to read with her fingers.
By six, the patterns of raised dots transformed in her mind into letters and words.
By seven she could read short stories, and, some 60 years later, she is a published author and poet. “It is how I think, how I express myself, how I go about my daily life,” Ms Maxwell said.
But to her horror, specialist schools, such as the one she attended, no longer exist in Victoria.
She fears Braille literacy will decline as a consequence. “You can’t learn Braille unless you are surrounded by it,” she said. “The sighted child has print everywhere...it’s impossible to learn to read properly unless you are immersed.”
Experts say blind children should interact daily with Braille in order to learn how to read fluently with their fingers.
They warn that talking computers, audio books and phones that can photograph text and read it to the user could marginalise Braille at schools.
While the blind community is divided over whether children should be educated at “integrated” schools or specialist centres, there is consensus on the question of Braille.
Blind Citizens Australia executive officer Robyn Gaile said Braille was crucial for children’s future happiness and development, and that inadequate Braille instruction led to illiteracy and social isolation.
The debate about mainstream education for all or specialist schools is not new. Some of us have felt that either/or is extreme and combinations much more effective. It is possible for schools to ‘specialise’ in assisting those with specific needs while being so called ‘mainstream’.
The following is some information about Braille.
About Braille
- Louis Braille’s idea came from a soldier who had served in the Napoleonic army and devised a system that could allow messages to be read in the dark.
- There are 26 combinations of Braille cell, which is made up of six dots. A full Braille cell looks like the number six on a dice. Each represents a letter of the alphabet. There are also shorthand patterns for common words.
- An estimated 10 per cent of legally blind children in America use Braille as their primary reading medium, compared to almost half in the 1950s. There are no comparable Australian statistics.
- From about the 1970s blind children in Australia started attending mainstream schools. There are three schools for the blind: in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland.