WISCONSIN BRAILLE NEWSLETTER
Volume 8, Issue 1
Spring/Summer 2006
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The
purpose of Wisconsin Braille Inc. is
to advance communication and coordinate the efforts of all persons concerned
with the availability, quality, and distribution of brailled materials in the
state of Wisconsin thereby encouraging braille literacy.
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Bad Braille — better
than nothing?
Wisconsin Braille
Teacher Survey Results
By
Dawn E. Soto
"Bad braille
is better than no braille at all." It's an adage sometimes heard in
connection with the education of visually impaired children. But is it true?
Perhaps not. Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom with a four page rough
draft of a worksheet written in longhand while all the other students have the
same material clearly printed on one page that has colorful boxes of
information located around the edges of the page and headings clearly outlining
the material. When the teacher refers to the "blue box" or "the
next-to-the-last paragraph," the readers of the printed page quickly
follow along. In the meantime, you, with the longhand draft, are searching,
turning pages this way and that, unable to keep up with the classroom
conversation. Perhaps you would have gotten more out of the conversation if you
had just listened rather than scrambling through pages trying to see what the
others were talking about. Of course, when test time came, having had no
printed study materials, you might not be nearly so well prepared as the
others.
My name is Dawn E.
Soto, Teacher of the Blind and Visually Impaired (TVI). I serve CESA 7 and
Calumet and Manitowoc Counties, and I know that this is a dilemma similar to
that faced by teachers and braille-reading students all over the state. Is
computer translated braille, produced without the input of a person knowledgeable
in braille, sufficient for a blind student in competition with sighted
students? Or, might it be, because such material without editing is like the
longhand draft mentioned above, worse than having no braille at all?
In a perfect world,
every school with a braille-reading student would employ a certified braille
transcriber to prepare the needed daily work. Why, when you have computer
translation programs, you might wonder, is it so important to have a
"certified" transcriber? Can't the teacher do it, or train an aide?
Teachers are taught braille, but with emphasis on reading, not writing or
producing. And, even if they had the training, heavy case loads make it
impossible for most teachers to produce daily braille. Transcribers who have
studied the transcription course and passed the Library of Congress—National Library Service (NLS)
certification examination are specially trained to work with the
complex instructional materials, visual diagrams, and tables that characterize
modern textbooks. If the teacher or teaching aide lacks the braille competency
to do this, the student must puzzle it out alone, while falling behind the
sighted members of the class.
I
am fortunate to have a certified braille transcriber producing the daily braille
for my brilliant 6th grade braille student. [See following story.] I believe wholeheartedly that his academic
success is due to having a certified transcriber providing well-prepared desk
top copies of braille materials at the same time his sighted peers are
"seeing" printed information throughout the school day.
Concerned about the quality and quantity of braille
in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin State Superintendent's Council on Blindness asked me,
a member of the council, to do a survey among teachers of the blind and
visually impaired to determine who is producing classroom materials in braille.
A total of 27 teachers responded to the survey, having in their care 68
visually impaired children. Some of the results of the survey are given below,
and they speak for themselves. Visually handicapped children are currently not
being given the help they need for academic achievement and success in life. If
you would like to learn more about the survey results contact me at sotod@chilton.k12.wi.us.
WISCONSIN BRAILLE SURVEY RESULTS
total teachers participating: 27
1. Number of braille students:
· Pre-braille: 12
·
Braille: 56
2. Who produces the daily braille?
· TVI (Teacher of the Blind and Visually Impaired): 21
· NLS (National Library Service – Library of
Congress)
Certified Braille Transcriber: 4
· TVI who is NLS certified: 3
· Aide (working on NLS certification): 1
· Aide (with instruction from Hadley): 1
· Aide (with instruction from the TVI): 4
· Aide (no Braille instruction): 2
3.
Conclusion:
Of the 36 individuals reported to be creating the
daily braille for the identified braille students from this survey, 29 of them
are not NLS certified braille transcribers.
This means that 80.5% of the daily braille
prepared for Wisconsin’s braille students (identified in this braille survey)
is not prepared by a certified braille transcriber.
(continued
on next page)
The survey also included an opportunity for teachers to add comments.
One teacher wrote:
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What "good" braille means to me — and
why I
think it is important to have a Braille Transcriber
by
Benny Nolan,
6th
grade student at Chilton Middle School
I think it is important to have a Braille
Transcriber because then you can have what you need in braille. Without
braille, your peers could get ahead of you in school. You might also have
trouble understanding some things.
My Braille Transcriber has helped me a
lot. I haven't fallen behind from my peers, and I get good grades. If I didn't
have a Braille Transcriber, I might not be excelling in school at all.
My Braille Transcriber brailles tests,
homework, and other things for me. Without a Braille Transcriber, I would have
to listen to all of my tests and homework, or have somebody read it to me. That
makes it a lot harder to understand, and the person might have trouble
describing things to you which makes doing your tests and homework even harder.
For example, in math class we have been doing a lot of line graphs and bar
graphs. Without a Braille Transcriber, I wouldn't have the freedom of feeling
the graph to see how it looks. If a person were to describe it to me, it would
be a lot harder to understand. Also, if you have it in braille, it takes a lot
less time. If I had to describe all of the graphs and what all of the things in
my homework looked like, it would take a very, very long time. Also, if the
visually impaired person didn't have a Braille Transcriber, they might feel
discouraged to do their homework and tests. They might feel like they aren't
smart because their peers are getting ahead of them.
Now, if the visually impaired person
had a Braille Transcriber, they would have the freedom of being just like
everyone else. For example, the visually impaired person would already have
their tests and homework with them, and they could understand better what the
teacher is trying to teach. Doing your homework and tests would also be less
time consuming and, if you get a bad grade and feel discouraged, the Braille
Transcriber might motivate you to try again and again. Also, the visually
impaired person's peers would have a very, very low chance to get ahead of him
or her because they would already have what they needed in braille, and they
would have the freedoms that everyone else had.
That is why I think it is important to have a Braille Transcriber.
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Book Review
Louis
Braille: A Touch of Genius
By C.
Michael Mellor. (Boston: National Braille Press Inc., 2006). Pp. 144.
C. Michael Mellor is to be
congratulated for a sprightly written and interesting biography of Louis
Braille. Among the many strengths of this book Mellor places braille in the
context of the time. He shows how the idea of educating blind individuals
originated in the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment, with its assumption of the
perfectibility of man. In addition to giving us a brief overview of French
history in the early 19th century, the book is also beautifully
illustrated, often with prints of the activities of blind people taken from
19th century French magazines.
Louis Braille was born in 1809, the
same year of birth as two other giants of the nineteenth century, Abraham
Lincoln and Charles Darwin. His birthplace was the village of Coupvray, 25
miles east of Paris. His father was a harness-maker, fashioning sturdy ones for
draft horses in the fields and highly decorated straps for the slender ponies
that pulled carriages. At the age of three Louis was sitting beside his father
at his workbench, imitating his father's movements. The youngster accidentally
poked himself in the eye with a sharp tool. Although sightless, the eye was not
surgically removed, and shortly thereafter, the other eye became inflamed. By
the time he was five years old Louis Braille was completely blind.
Realizing that their son was
uncommonly bright and inquisitive, Simon-Rene and Monique Braille asked their
parish priest to tutor him in the rudiments of arithmetic, literature, and, of
course, Christian beliefs. After a year of private tutoring the priest
persuaded the village schoolteacher to let the seven-year-old blind child into
his classroom. So impressed was the teacher with Louis' intelligence that after
two years he persuaded a local aristocrat to finance the lad's further
education at the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris. Founded in
1786, this school was the oldest and most respected institution for the blind
in Europe, indeed in the world.
Valentin Haüy, founder of the school,
had devised a way of teaching blind students to read by touching raised letters
of the alphabet with their fingers. After experimenting with wooden letters,
Haüy invented a reverse printing press that, instead of engraving, raised the
letters on a piece of paper. By the time Louis Braille entered the school in
1819, it had a library of more than 2,000 volumes of embossed books. In
addition to academic classes and manual workshops (weaving and sewing were
common occupations for the blind), the school offered instruction in music.
Finding that blind students often had finely tuned ears, professional musicians
from around Paris provided voluntary instruction on a variety of instruments.
Louis Braille was an apt student of the organ, and in later years supplemented
his income as a schoolteacher by playing at Sunday services in some of the
city's most prestigious churches.
The problems with the Haüy system of
reading were that the embossed books were unwieldy (about nine pounds per
volume) and few pupils could master the art of reading embossed letters by
touch. Students who could neither follow lines nor see the edge of the paper
found writing next to impossible, although Louis Braille did manage to write
legibly by stretching a thin wire across the paper to guide his hand.
The idea of writing by using an
embossed dot code, instead of letters of the alphabet, was not originally Louis
Braille's. It was conceived instead by a French army officer, Captain Charles
Barbier, who wanted to find a way to transmit orders without sound during night
maneuvers. When French military authorities showed no interest in his system,
he realized that it might benefit the blind, and in 1820 he became an
instructor at the Institution des Jeunes Aveugles. )
By the time he arrived at the school
Barbier had devised a rudimentary slate and stylus for raising dots on a piece
of paper by punching from below. Barbier's code was based on a twelve-dot
cell--two vertical columns of six dots each. Unfortunately his dot combinations
formed sounds of the French language, rather than individual letters, which
made it difficult to master. Students at the Institution were nevertheless
initially delighted with the new system, for it enabled them to put their own
thoughts on paper and communicate secretly with one another. For educational
purposes, however, Barbier's system had serious drawbacks: it had no spelling,
no grammar, and no way to represent numbers or musical notes. Frustrated by
Barbier's ponderous system, Louis Braille at age 15 set out to refine it, and
in doing so revolutionized reading and writing for the blind.
Braille cut Barbier's cell in half, to
six dots--two across and three down--which neatly fit a reader's fingertip.
With six dots, sixty-three patterns are mathematically possible, sufficient to
represent the letters of the alphabet, numbers, and reading signs such as
accents and punctuation. The top left-hand dot (dot one) was the letter a;
dots one and two (proceeding downward on the left side) composed the letter b;
dots one and four the letter c, and so forth. Dots three, four, five,
and six constituted a number sign, which converted a in the next cell to
the number one, b to a two, etc.
Braille, now 16 years old, taught his
system to his fellow students, and they quickly grasped its advantages for both
reading and writing. In 1829 the school published a manual for studying
Braille's code with embossed print and brailled examples. By then Louis
Braille, recognizing the earnings value of blind musicians, had devised a
six-dot music code. Realizing that it would be confusing to the student if the
musical note C were the same dot configuration as the letter c, Braille
used the seven alphabet letters beginning with d (dots one, four, five)
to form the musical scale CDEFGAB (do, re, mi . . . on the
vocal scale). Since all of these letters were formed out of the top two rows of
the six-dot cell, he could use the bottom row (dots three and six) to designate
time: eighth notes, quarter notes, half notes, whole notes.
Louis Braille was employed as a
teacher at the Institute in 1828. He remained in that position the rest of his
life, dying of tuberculosis in 1852. Although his code system had been adopted
outside France (Belgium, Switzerland) by the time of his death, it was slow to
be accepted in Britain and the United States. Opposition to it in the U.S. was
led by Samuel Gridley Howe, influential president of a school for the blind in
Boston (now known as the Perkins School for the Blind), who preferred the old
embossed-letter system. American schools began using the braille code toward
the end of the 19th century, but a uniform braille code was not accepted by the
English-speaking world until 1932.
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Meet Karen Majkrzak (may-zak)
Executive
Director
Wisconsin
Council of the Blind & Visually Impaired
Thank
you for the opportunity to share some information about myself as the new
Executive Director of the Council. As the mother of a visually impaired son who
now teaches music at Saint Herman Seminary in Alaska, I have a long
acquaintance with the Council and its services.
Personally,
I've worked on community programs and services for low-income, homebound elders
in Connecticut and Illinois, and in non-profit organizations, including
Cardinal Hill Hospital in Lexington, KY, run by the Easter Seal Society.
The
Council has a long history of advocating for laws that affect the lives of
individuals who are blind or visually impaired. Our Braille Committee is in
place to appear at public hearings and to work toward passage of Assembly Bill
1142 that relates to accessible instructional materials for students with
disabilities.
I
invite you to contact me at karen@wcblind.org with your questions,
comments, ideas, or concerns!
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The Braille Corner
Dear Readers,
In the previous two issues, Ms. Perkins has been discussing the differences between EBAE and FORMATS, and we continue in this issue with more differences.
* * * * *
Ordinal numbers
- EBAE: VII.29 When the second and third ordinal numbers are represented in print by the number followed by the letter “d” only, the letters “n” or “r” respectively should be inserted in braille.
- FORMATS: R5. 4.c. When the second and third ordinal numbers are shown followed by only the letter d, do not insert the letters n or r. The letter indicator must be used before the letter d when it is printed unspaced after a numeral.
Plays
· EBAE: Ap.A.8.a(1),(2) Italics should be omitted for all stage directions, settings, etc., and the braille parentheses should be substituted for all brackets found in the print copy. Ap.A.8.b(3) The name of each character should be followed by a period, and the dialogue should begin on the same line.
- FORMATS: R9. 1.b.(1) Follow the print copy for punctuation shown after the name of each speaker. If no punctuation is shown in print, insert a braille colon.
Poetry
- EBAE: IV.22.b The note, preceded by its asterisk sign, should be written in paragraph form, starting in cell 7, with all runovers beginning in cell 5.
- FORMATS: R10. 1.e.(2) Notes to poetry in verse form. Notes must start four cells to the right of the beginning of the runover indention, whether or not there actually are runovers.
Preliminary Pages
- EBAE and FORMATS: Although changes have not been made to EBAE, permission was granted by BANA for all preliminary pages, literary and textbook, to be formatted according to the guidelines in FORMATS.
References
- EBAE: IV.23 When the meaning is obvious, references may be condensed. Where Roman numerals occur in references, Arabic numbers should be substituted for them.
- FORMATS: R1. 15.c.(2), (3) Abbreviations must be brailled as printed. Follow the print copy for the spacing and punctuation of Arabic or roman numerals and for lowercase or capital roman numerals. If a colon is shown between Arabic or roman numerals follow print.
NOTE: Because of space limitations, I have quoted only parts of each rule in EBAE and FORMATS. Please read the entire rule in order to understand fully the differences that exist between the two formats.
Sincerely,
Ms. Perkins
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Ask Mr. #s
Dear Mr. #s,
I
notice that often in mathematics texts, a good bit of blank space has been left
at the end of a line when it appears to me that material on the next line could
have been brailled there. In literary braille, we were told to use as much of
the line as possible. What is the reason for this difference in Nemeth Code
transcriptions?
Wondering
Dear Wondering,
An important rule of the Nemeth Code is placed at the end of the Code book, and sometimes gets overlooked. It is §185, Runovers. The first portion of this rule states: "As much of a braille line must be left blank as necessary in order to keep all of a mathematical expression on a single braille line." What you have noticed could well be lengthy equations which should not be divided. They are considered to be
"mathematical
expressions." An example could be this equation: 2 + 4 + 6+ ... +2n =
n(n+1) + (n‑1) This equation will fit on one braille line, even though it
is divided between print lines.
The
rule goes on to give examples of other things that should be kept together.
"Enclosed lists" ‑‑ such as (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) ‑‑
must not be divided between lines if they will fit on a single line.
Abbreviations ‑‑ such as 3 P.M. or Fig. 6.10 or x ft ‑‑
should not be divided from their preceding or following numbers or letters. And
hyphenated expressions of which one part is mathematical — for instance 6-inch
ruler ‑‑ must not be divided between lines.
The
rule goes on to give a priority list of places to divide expressions when they
are too long to be kept on one braille line.
Sincerely,
Mr. #s
[Address your questions to Ms. Perkins or Mr. #s
c/o Wisconsin Braille Inc., P.O. Box 45076, Madison, WI 53744-5076]
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ARE YOU A RECYCLING FREAK LIKE ME???
IF SO, READ ON…
By Pat Foltz
Have you been ordering braille books from the Special Book Project? If your students are no longer reading them, they have progressed beyond either the content or the age level and you no longer have younger students “coming up,” storage space may become a problem.
In the event that you no longer need or want to keep the earlier copies of books received from this project, WisBrl is interested in, and willing to begin a book exchange. Rather than shed them, only to have them reproduced for someone else at a future time, why not save the paper and store them for a while?
If you are interested in participating in a book exchange, pack the books in a “Free Matter” box and send them to me. I will store them, catalog them and send them out to those who will want them in the future. I prefer to use the black “Free Matter” boxes, as they are easier to ship from this end, but books can also be passed on to me via TVIs or O&M Instructors at conferences, etc.
If you would like to send books to me, please email me first, so that I know they are coming. I would not want them sitting on my door step while I was on vacation. Please contact me at:
Pat Foltz
4005 Old Stone Rd.
Oregon, WI 53575
(608) 455-1522
psfoltz@chorus.net
Happy Recycling!!
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The Wisconsin Braille newsletter is published three times a year. Deadlines are: Spring/Summer – May 1, Fall – September 1, Winter – December 15
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The purpose of this newsletter is to disperse information. Wisconsin Braille Inc. does not endorse or vouch for the reliability of any of the persons, organizations, or products appearing in this publication.
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Wisconsin Braille Inc. welcomes letters from readers on all subjects concerning braille and blindness. Publication of letters will be at the editor’s discretion. Letters must be signed, but names will be withheld upon request.
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MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION
Use the following form to join or renew your membership to Wisconsin Braille Inc. Please make checks and money orders payable to: WISCONSIN BRAILLE INC.
Regular membership, annual dues: $10
Sustaining membership, annual dues: $30
Lifetime membership: $200
Please include: your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address. Also advise if you wish printed material to be sent to you in regular type, e-mail or braille.
Please answer the following: What is your affiliation with the braille-reading community? (List all that apply.) Teacher, educational assistant, transcriber, proofreader, administrator, producer, parent, user, other (specify).
Return application and payment to: Wisconsin Braille Inc., P.O. Box 45076, Madison, WI 53744-5076.
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This version of the Wisconsin Braille newsletter was prepared by the members of the OSCI Braille Program. It has not been proofread. Readers are encouraged to report noted errors to: Wisconsin Braille Newsletter, Editor, P.O. Box 45076, Madison, WI 53744-5076.