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Deafblind person here. Braille isn't a nice to have for me. It's a must-have. We Deafblind are certainly a rare species , and unfortunately, usually forgotten. I learned Braille "later" in life when my sight nosedived at age 27. Best decision I've ever made. A few thoughts about the low Braille literacy levels. First of all, most visually impaired children are not completely blind, and this is especially true with progressive eye conditions such as retinitis pigmentosa (which I have as part of Usher syndrome, which presents with hearing and viision losses). Magnification and color technology has enabled people who can't read 12-point fonts to read now. For instance, I'm close to completely blind in one eye, and have somethign like 20/300 in the other ... and I can use built-in features to zoom in/invert colors to read visually. So, "visually impaired" =/= completely blind. Also, you must use Braille every day to develop neural pathways to process it quickly. It only took me 2 weeks to learn the code. It took me much, much longer to internalize it--to the point when I can jsut put my fingers on it and get it. For people who can still see, especially if they see enough to benefit handsomely form magnification technology, it's hard to feel motivated. There are a lot of other issues that I won't get into. But what I can say is that blind people can get away without learnign Braille, sure, but they won't be able to excel at certain things. For instance, Braille is still the only thing that gives blind people a spatial appreciation for language. Language is more than words. It comes in paragraphs, has puncuation, et cetera. If a blind person wnats to truly master their language, they must learn Braille. They can get buy without it, sure, but ... they won't excel at it. On the pratical side, you need to know braille to label things. This is why I advocate for at least a functional knowledge of Braille. If you have a labeler, you can label wine bottles and cans that feel identical. This is where audio-only approach fails. There's a lot more I could say on the topic, but I'll stop here. Just putting this out there: I wish people would stop sayign that text-to-speech technology has obviated Braille. There are Deafblind people out ther, too, and Braille will always have a place for those who want to excel at writing and reading. |