The Braille crisis

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

The shift began in the ’70s, when most designated “schools for the blind” shut down, and blind children were integrated into public school systems. While blind schools had mandated the use of Braille for all, public schools often did just the opposite. Fuelling that shift, says CNIB’s Rafferty, were a host of new concerns associated with being the lone blind kid among the sighted masses. “For a lot of parents,” he says, Braille became “a stigma that labels children who might have a little bit of vision as being blind.”

For school districts, new technology is cheaper than hiring a Braille teacher. And even Rodrigues, who calls Braille her “most precious tool as a blind person,” waxes rhapsodic about her Daisy Digital Talking Player: a new-fangled, internationally standardized audio book for the visually impaired that has top-tier sound quality and allows her to “flip” between pages. Rodrigues says that, on many a night, she falls asleep to the sound of hers. But she admits the poetry of sitting down to read a book is lost on an audio CD. “Braille makes everything come alive,” she muses. “I can stop and ponder a word. Or I can go back and read part of the last paragraph. The words just dance off the page under my fingers.”

Some advocates for the blind say it’s not only the magic that’s lost. In a study Ryles conducted, she found that blind students who’d been taught Braille early scored about the same as sighted students on a standardized test measuring reading comprehension (61 versus 62 per cent). For those with no Braille training, that score fell to an average of 38 per cent. The discrepancy was worse for spelling. Having a written culture, versus an oral culture, also shapes the way we think, according to some scholars. In another study, a University of Calgary communications professor Doug Brent and his wife, Diana, who teaches blind children, studied short stories written by blind students. They found that stories by kids who did not know Braille were more likely to feature fantastical characters or plots—not a bad thing. But they also tended to be grammatically poor, disorganized and illogical. “As if all of their ideas are crammed into a container, shaken and thrown randomly onto a sheet of paper like dice onto a table,” the Brents concluded.

There’s even an economic case for Braille: in a study of legally blind adults who’d lost their vision between birth and age 2, Ryles found that a whopping 77 per cent of non-Braille users were unemployed. That number dropped to 56 per cent for those who knew Braille. Of those whose Braille knowledge was “extensive,” most were employed.

But if a child learns Braille, in Canada there is no minimum guarantee of how much instruction he or she will receive. “It depends on the school system,” says Rafferty. Schools look at Braille like “tae kwon do lessons,” Ryles says: something kids should get for a few hours a week. “If we taught print to our six-year-old sighted kids in that same way, no one would be literate.”

That said, there are blind adults who do just fine without Braille. New York Gov. David Paterson, who refused to learn it as a child, is one. Cathy MacDonald, a stay-at-home mom in Lower Sackville, N.S., is another. MacDonald lost her sight to diabetes in her twenties. She gave Braille a try, but was “never really inspired” by it. She graduated from community college with the help of talking books, and thinks Braille is an archaic system. The people pushing for Braille, she says, are often “baby boomers who don’t want anything to do with computers and who are not opening their mind up to new technology.”

CNIB is not averse to technology’s wonders. At any hour, the recording studio at its Toronto office is full of (mostly) silver-haired volunteers—like Simon Curwen, a deep-voiced Brit and self-professed “ham”—who come in for three-hour shifts to lend their songful voices to the production of new audio materials. But the institute is adamant that technology should be a supplement for most childen. Its website proclaims: “Braille = Equality, Braille = Independence, Braille = Choice.”

Four months after its threatened closure, the CNIB library remains open—thanks to the governments of Ontario, Alberta, New Brunswick, P.E.I., and the Northwest Territories, which all answered the plea for short-term funding. But Rafferty says this is unsustainable. He asks that the CNIB library be federally funded, like other public libraries. “It’s a fundamental human rights issue,” he protests. “Why should someone who is blind have to go to a charity to receive their library, when every other Canadian gets it through regular government services?” Rafferty says Canada is the only G8 country to not fund library services for the blind.

Advocates worry that if Braille materials are harder to access, the balance between Braille and audio will be tipped even further. Ryles, a former Grade 1 teacher, began researching Braille when her own son was born blind. Given the state of things today, she says she’s starting to feel fortunate that he was born completely in the dark: with no sight at all. That way, he was at least guaranteed some Braille. “We were very lucky that we didn’t go through all that: ‘Should he read print? Should he read Braille?’ ” she says. “You could not have convinced me at the time that we were lucky. But we were lucky.”