Global and Regional Perspectives

43 years ago the time of my total freedom ended: no, I did not get married (I was too young for that); but I had to start my school career. I had anticipated that day; but when it came time to say goodbye to my parents and stay at the dormitory with all those strangers, my enthusiasm was gone for a while. Mainstreaming had not been invented in Germany at that time, and even students who lived a few minutes away from the school were not permitted to live at home. For newcomers there was the rule that we were not even allowed to go home on the weekend for the first three weeks, because we were expected to feel more at home in our dormitory that way. We probably were good students, because after two weeks they had mercy with us and we were allowed to travel home on the weekend. When my mother picked me up at the bus stop she asked: “So how does school taste?” And I replied: “oh, it’s boring. We didn’t even learn to read!”

Reading. That was something I had anticipated. I had seen a Braille alphabet, but all those crumbs on that paper which I couldn’t wipe off did not make any sense to me. But at school we had to do some games where we put pearls on a string, put little plugs or nails into holes and the like. Later I learnt that this was done in order to make our sense of touch more sensitive. I don’t know if I really needed that, but at least it did not harm me either.

Then, finally after three weeks we got our first book. And we started to learn the writing system for the blind; I later learnt that the man who invented this system was called Louis Braille, that he was only 16 years of age when he introduced his system and that he was blind himself. I also learnt that his sighted teachers were against his system of writing, because the letters were so much unlike the letters they used, but blind people insisted on Braille as their means of reading and writing, and now Braille was used all over the world. All blind people all over the world used the same system. Wow, that sounded and felt great! And of course it made sense that blind people knew better than their educators what was the right thing for them.

Of course we did not only learn to read; we also were introduced to writing; briefly, we started out only with a wooden board which had holes arranged according to the 6-dot cell; we had to stick nails into those wholes and thus form the new letters we learnt. Pretty soon, however, we were taught the “real” writing method: slate and stylus (or Braille frame, if you like). We found out that we were reading from left to right and writing from right to left; this did not seem particularly complicated to us. I only was told later by people who do not use Braille as their prime method of reading and writing that this skill is too hard for children to master; thank Goodness I had mastered the skill by then and can now take notes and write letters without having to carry heavy or electronic equipment with me wherever I go.

In fifth grade we learnt German contracted Braille, and after one year of English lessons I was introduced to English grade II Braille.

I have always loved Braille, although I must admit that I wasn’t a “book worm” at first. Letters or magazines were just fine for me. Only when a book was of special interest to me I read it with great enthusiasm and aloud - if someone was willing to listen.

The schools I went to had their own libraries, and there were plenty of books to chose from. And when I at about age 17 thought that cooking might be something I might enjoy, there was even a cookbook - printed about two decades before. The age of the book did not matter: I knew that printing Braille books was a rather difficult task and lengthy process, and I was thankful for what was available, which after all was more than I could ever read anyway.

That was the time when Germany still consisted of two States with a very different political system. This, of course, also effected the blindness field. Whereas in West Germany every blind people got and still gets a certain amount of money from the state to cover the extra expenses he or she may incur because of blindness, in East Germany products, especially books, were subsidized, so that a Braille book had the same price as the print edition. This had they effect that people were more likely to buy Braille books and that therefore a bigger variety of topics were available. And even after the East German authorities realized that it did not make sense to sell books subsidized by their government at the same low price to blind people from capitalist countries, books we could buy in Leipzig were much cheaper than the ones sold by West German Braille printing houses.

Than came computer technology which revolutionized Braille production. Software was written which made it possible to “translate” computer files into Braille. Scanners with word recognition software made it possible to produce computer files of printed material, which then could be converted to Braille. So more and more Braille became available; and - since personal Braille printers became available at ever lower prices - many private people could start to produce their own material.

Of course there can be some drawbacks to electronically produced Braille material: First of all, computer software does not always format a text in the best possible way. For example, it may centre a heading, but if this heading is longer than one line, often the line is broken near the end of the heading, so that you have a hardly centred very long line and a very short one which may only contain one word. Then many Braille translation programs do not “know” the rules for proper splitting of words. So if there is a long word, often rather then splitting it they set the complete word into the next line. So you get a mixture of long and shorter lines, which does not look nice and also is an obstacle to fluid even Braille reading. This is especially true for languages for German, where rather long words occur frequently. And then, of course, contracted Braille has its own set of rules which require more knowledge of the structure of a word or a sentence than the Braille translation software can have. In German Grade II Braille, for example, a contraction may be allowed in one context but not in another. The person writing Braille knows that, but the computer does not. So you often end up with Braille texts which are far from being perfect. For texts which you produce for personal use only - like the notes for a speech or the minutes of a meeting - this may be acceptable. But should we also accept that in Books or magazines, especially if we have to pay rather big money for them?

The advent of computers brought those up front again who - like the teachers of Louis Braille’s days - felt that Braille was separating the blind from the sighted and was not a useful skill. Now - they argued - blind people have the same access to information as sighted people; they just must use speech output; speech input will be available, too, so why bother with Braille which is bulky and can only be read by a rather small fraction of the blind population anyway. Avid Braille users know and prove that just working with speech output by far is not the same as having a text under your fingers. And: Speech output and speech input are also available for the sighted. Why doesn’t anybody suggest that they do not need their system of reading and writing any more?

In the last few years, we in Germany see another variation of this old song: “OK”, the experts say, “we agree that Braille is a good thing. But your six dots isolate blind children from the sighted kids in their classroom. For example, while a sighted child learns that there are capital and lower case letters, the blind child is supposed to learn special rules for indicating if a word is spelt with a capital letter. And while the sighted child learns signs which represent numbers, the blind child must understand that there is a number-sign, followed by the letters a through j to indicate we are dealing with a number. So let’s start teaching children the 8-dot Eurobraille code as the first reading and writing system! Then the blind child can learn along with the sighted child, using the same text books.”

One teacher explained this to me with a practical example: “The first word children learn at my school is “Eis” (the German word for Ice or Ice-cream); the blind child now does not have to learn “Capital sign, e, I, s” but “Capital e, I, s” like the sighted child. (For those unfamiliar with 8-dot Eurobraille I should mention that we use dot 7, which is underneath dot 3, to indicate capital letters). I will come back to this example in a moment.

Exactly one week ago at this time I was sitting in a meeting where we discussed the question of whether to introduce students to literary or computer Braille first. Basically, it was the delegates from the self-help movement of the blind against delegates of the organization of educators of the blind. We argued that every adult person who can read the 8-dot computer Braille agrees that the 6-dot code is much easier and quicker to read and that therefore the six-dot regular Braille code should be the first one which should be taught. “Yes”, the teachers said, “6-dot code is easier to read. But nowadays children must be able to work with a computer as early as possible, and then they need the 8-dot computer Braille code.” And of course, there was also the argument about the blind child being integrated into a class with all sighted students. I gave the above example and pointed out that for decades it was accepted wisdom in the blindness field that letters should be introduced according to their readability; so we started out with a, b, l, k, o - all letters where there is some space between the individual characters. And, even more important: Letters which look reversed (like d, f, h and j) should not be introduced in the same lessen. In “Eis” we exactly have two reversed letters: e and i. So, I asked, are those rules not valid any more. “Well”, the experts informed me, “They still are. But when a blind child is sitting next to a sighted child, the child does not have the choice of using a different book.” I suggested to demand that since we all agree that the sense of sight is different to the sense of touch, touch reading should be taught according to the needs of the sense of touch and not according to the sense of sight. So when reading and writing are being taught, the blind child should be instructed separately and according to his or her needs. This was almost answered with outrage: “I refuse to deal with a proposal like that”, one teacher said, “Because it is totally against the concept of integration”. I insisted that the main principle in the education of blind children should not be what is best for integration, but what is best for the individual child - but to no avail. This reminds me of a wise word my friend Arne Husveg, first vice president of the World Blind Union, once said: “Mainstreaming is a river in which many blind children may drown.”

There was a time when MS DOS was the state of the art disk operating system. We had a fixed screen with 25 lines with 80 cells each. There also were some characters which became quite important for which there was no Braille equivalent, because although Louis Braille was a genius, he could not anticipate which other characters might come into existence one day. In order to solve that problem, an auxiliary Braille code had to be developed. Unfortunately, this occurred in several places at the same time. In North America, they use a different system from Europe. Attempts were made to create a unified Braille equivalent to the ASCII code - but that would have meant that each side would have to give up some parts of a system they had become accustomed to, so it never really was accepted. Be that as it may - - and I think it is unfortunate, to say the least - we all will agree that 8-dot computer Braille codes were just meant as a helping tool, never as a code to which preference should be given. And it needs to be noted that 8-dot-Braille codes which existed long before the advent of computers, for example as a special speedy shorthand system for blind stenographers in German speaking countries, never really caught on.

Now our teachers in Germany go so far as to agree with us that the 6-dot code is the main code; but they will not agree that therefore it is the code which should be taught to a child as the first code. We argue that an 8-dot cell is too big for the finger tip of a 6-year old child. They say that this is not true, and that Chinese women with tiny hands can read it, too. This conflict has not been solved yet; maybe we need some research to prove which side is right. - It was said that the teacher should decide based on the individual situation of a child whether the 6- or 8-dot Braille code should be introduced first. Now imagine an itinerant teacher who hasn’t had a blind first-grader for a few years who now finds himself in the situation where he or she has to teach Braille to a blind child. If a computer is available for the child, which decision will the teacher take? Or those teachers at a residential school for the blind who already in 1998 started to instruct Eurobraille as the first code - are they likely to change their minds and see that for a lot of children the regular literary Braille code is more appropriate?

I must come back to the good old days when I still believed that the Braille code was the same all over the world, at least in those countries which use our kind of alphabet (which includes Cyrillic letters). When I started to learn English, I noticed the first minor difference: Our question mark has dots 2 and 6, the English question mark has dots 2, 3 and 6. But this was a minor difference.

When I tried to learn Russian, something in which I failed so far, I felt real fortunate: While sighted students had to struggle with the new letters, I could use what I already was familiar with, with the addition of a few characters which even were close to a German equivalent. But in my own country they made another change in 1972: They changed the period-sign from the original dots 2,5,6 to dot 3. At that time I thought that was great, since it really was a dot - just like in print. Nowadays, being a person who reads a lot to other people, especially my wife, I often wish I had the old Period-sign again, which even when you read fast cannot be accidentally misread as a comma. Of course it also angers me that individual countries feel free to make changes to the Braille code if they feel like doing so.

This became even more apparent in the 80s, when we had to cope with MS DOS and the ASCII code. There now was only one quotation mark available on the computer, while we had an opening and closing quote in Braille. On the other hand, there was an opening and closing parenthesis - for which we used the same symbol in Braille. Some computer enthusiasts demanded that the national Braille codes should be changed according to their needs, and countries where innovations tend to be made rather quickly did just that, for example by simply swapping the quotation marks and the parentheses. Then came MS Windows - and suddenly there was a difference between opening and closing quotation marks again. Too bad for those who adapted the Braille code according to the needs of the computer rather than the regular reader! I am glad that we in Germany did not fall into this trap!

Windows brought another significant change: the old standard 80-character line had come to an end. This meant that an 80-cell Braille display would not necessarily hold the equivalent of one line of text on the computer. Thus to need for a one-to-one representation of a print line was gone. Many people think that this - at least for the average computer user - means that we can get rid of the 8-dot-Braille code. This is undermined by the fact that many screen readers now have a built-in grade II translator, so we can read grade-II-Braille on our Braille displays. The German Federation of the Blind and Partially Sighted has initiated a project which should make it possible to have the basic 6-dot Braille code on a Braille display. This means, for example, that if you type a one on your keyboard, you will get number sign-a on your Braille display. The project phase officially has ended, and the results are promising, though far from perfect. The producer of adaptive technology who carried out the technical side of the project has agreed to continue working on the software. There are still some problems which need to be solved, and we do not know yet whether we will get an almost perfect solution. But if we were successful, teachers would have a harder time to justify their insistence on starting out their students on Eurobraille.

Let’s go back to the increased availability of Braille material. As I said before, many private individuals are able to produce their own material, including books they scanned into their computer. So it only seems logical that these files - rather than having to be reproduced several times by interested readers - should be made available and shared with others who want to read the same books. This is somewhat tricky, since you need a copyright legislation which does not prohibit this service. In the USA they are fortunate to have such legislation. So BOOKSHARE was established. I do not have personal experiences with this service, but I read that it works similar to programs like Napster in the music field. You look for a book which interests you, and if it is available you can download it to your computer. I am sure our North-American friends who participate in this conference can inform us in more detail about this service.

As I said, in many countries copyright legislation would prohibit such services. However, there is another, technical problem involved here, too: And that is the fact that we do not have a unified world wide computer code. If I was allowed to download a Braille file from an American site, either my printer or my Braille display will have to be able to reproduce the American computer code; otherwise reading the file will be a hard and not enjoyable task. Fortunately, most printers and Braille displays have this option; however, it would be much nicer if we would not have to switch between our regular and some other Braille table.

What we need is a world wide council on Braille, which should have the will and the authority to work on a unified system of Braille codes all over the world. The World Blind Union is in the process of setting up this body, and I hope it will become a successful undertaking.

Although it would have been tempting, I did not use the word “Unified Braille Code”, since this term is in use for something else already. So far, blind individuals have to learn several Braille codes, depending on their needs. First and most important there is the literary Braille Code, which is what we usually find in books, magazines and other texts. If you deal with mathematics or scientific annotation, there again is at least one other code you have to learn. And, again, there is no unified Braille math code all over the world. In Germany alone three math Braille codes are in use, one of them basically only at one particular institution though. Another task for the World Braille Council. - But back to the different Braille codes one might have to learn. If you work on a computer, you have to learn the computer Braille code. This code more and more invades literary texts as well, since email and internet addresses can be found regularly in magazine articles and other texts. So the blind individual ends up learning several codes. A sighted person does not have to bother with this; he or she must know a few more characters which neatly fit into the regular writing system, but he does not have to re-learn numbers, punctuation signs and the like. So in the English speaking countries they started developing the “Unified Braille Code”, which aims at having one Braille code which can accommodate the different areas of use. I think this is a great idea; however, again it is one language group developing something useful for themselves. This code is created in accordance with the needs of those who speak English as their first language, and it has to take into consideration the rules English speaking readers are familiar with. Other countries could follow this example, but the result would have to look quite different. So again the old dream of having the same Braille code all over the world drifts quite a bit away from being a reality. In a world which moves closer together this is a sad factor. Once a system is established, it is much harder to get it to change. But probably it is too late to try to create a world-wide Unified Braille Code.

As I have pointed out, there is more Braille available than ever before. Yet, in many countries, especially the industrialized ones, the use of Braille is on the decline. There are several reasons for that: One of them is that in the education of blind children, especially those who are being mainstreamed, there is not enough emphasis put on Braille. The same is true for children with some residual vision: rather than teaching them both print and Braille and letting them decide in which situation which writing system suits them best, they are forced to work with print only, often causing them heavy eye strain. When a person becomes blind as an adult, he or she is often told by friends, opthomologists and sometimes even by rehab personnel that they “need not bother” with Braille. If the person has diabetes, he or she is told that they would not be able to feel the tiny Braille dots. There are cases where this is true, but these cases are much less common than some people have come to believe.

If the person can use a computer, as mentioned above, he or she may be told that because of speech output there was no need to learn to read with the fingers. And if the person is in retirement age it is often assumed that he or she is too old to learn Braille. However, many of us who have taught Braille to adults can tell wonderful stories about seniors who became Braille enthusiasts. Learning Braille is not so much a question of on-set of blindness as it is a question of motivation. We who use it on a daily basis and who wouldn’t have our jobs or other positions in social life without our knowledge of Braille must not accept that Braille is viewed as a second-class system of communication. I think that an organization like the “National Association to Promote the Use of Braille” in the USA is a step in the right direction; we need the same thing in other countries as well.

When it comes to reading, blind people are at a disadvantage compared to sighted kids: the sighted child has a lot more reading material, not only as far as books or magazines are concerned, but other useful things like street signs, posters, writing on the CDs they love to hear, goods they buy, advertisements (although in many cases we may wonder about their “usefulness”). So the need to be able to read is much more obvious for sighted people than for the blind. Therefore, if we want to convince more blind children and people who become blind later in life of the need to learn Braille, we must see to it that Braille is available not only in books, magazines and on the computer Braille display. We need Braille on elevators, on the keys of automatic teller machines, vending machines, on medicine packages; we want Braille menus in restaurants, Braille instructions for equipment we buy - especially for products specifically designed for the blind - and we want to show them that Braille is as useful to us as print is for the sighted. This includes taking advantage of our equivalent to the ball point pan for the sighted: Slate and stylus.

It is important for me to stay a moment on that little device. A man who lost his sight in world war II once told me that learning to write with this equipment helped him to better memorize the letters he learnt. To me, that makes sense, because although you reverse sides, you still have to follow the shape of the letter. Yet, this useful tool is so much neglected in Braille instruction today. I feel it was to my advantage that in my school days we started out by writing with slate and stylus; did ever any research prove that starting with the Perkins or any other Brailler is the better way to go?

I am the director of an educational program for blind people. A few years ago I had hired a new sighted secretary. When we sent out a letter to participants of one of our seminars, I added the sentence “Please bring writing equipment with you to the seminar”. She told me that would be superfluous: “After all, who would attend a seminar without bringing something to take notes with”, she said. How surprised she was when the first participant called and asked her: “What should I bring? I cannot carry a heavy Brailler in addition to my suitcase.” If this would have happened a few weeks later, she would have been able to give the appropriate answer: “Do what I do: Use a slate and stylus!”

There are several more topics on which I could touch, but I am afraid I have taken enough of your time. I did not mention the DAISY project which can make it possible to combine the talking book with a Braille book. I did not mentioned software which makes it possible to convert HTML-files directly into well formatted Braille texts. I did not report on research carried out in the USA which shows that - if I remember correctly - about 90 percent of those few blind people who find employment over there are Braille users. Fortunately, we have the woman who carried out that research among us, so she can report on this much more accurate and detailed than I could. I have not told you about initiatives aiming at increasing Braille reading speed. I myself conduct such seminars together with a friend from Switzerland, and we were inspired by what is being done on that field here in Denmark, our host country.

Let me close with one thought: I mentioned the unfortunate situation of many blind children who are being mainstreamed and do not get instruction according to their specific needs as blind individuals. Should we sit back and lament this situation? I don’t think so. We cannot and should not work against mainstreaming. But we as blind individuals and - since not all of us present here are blind - as Braille enthusiasts must reach out to our young blind and low-vision children and help them to see that Braille is the essential ingredient to a successful life, even or better especially in the computer age. And if they don’t get enough of that at school, let us help them get what they need. This is one of our most noble responsibilities.

Thank you!