Part III; listening to Braille

Part III

Braille readers do not deny that new reading technology has been
transformative, but Braille looms so large in the mythology of blindness
that it has assumed a kind of talismanic status. Those who have residual
vision and still try to read print - very slowly or by holding the page an
inch or two from their faces - are generally frowned upon by the National
Federation of the Blind, which fashions itself as the leader of a civil
rights movement for the blind. Its president, Marc Maurer, a voracious
reader, compares Louis Braille to Abraham Lincoln. At the annual convention
for the federation, held at a Detroit Marriott last July, I heard the mantra
"listening is not literacy" repeated everywhere, from panels on the Braille
crisis to conversations among middle-school girls. Horror stories
circulating around the convention featured children who don't know what a
paragraph is or why we capitalize letters or that "happily ever after" is
made up of three separate words.

Declaring your own illiteracy seemed to be a rite of passage. A vice
president of the federation, Fredric Schroeder, served as commissioner of
the Rehabilitation Services Administration under President Clinton and
relies primarily on audio technologies. He was openly repentant about his
lack of reading skills. "I am now over 50 years old, and it wasn't until two
months ago that I realized that 'dissent,' to disagree, is different than
'descent,' to lower something," he told me. "I'm functionally illiterate.
People say, 'Oh, no, you're not.' Yes, I am. I'm sorry about it, but I'm not
embarrassed to admit it."

While people like Laura Sloate or the governor of New York, David A.
Paterson, who also reads by listening, may be able to achieve without the
help of Braille, their success requires accommodations that many cannot
afford. Like Sloate, Paterson dictates his memos, and his staff members
select pertinent newspaper articles for him and read them aloud on his voice
mail every morning. (He calls himself "overassimilated" and told me that as
a child he was "mainstreamed so much that I psychologically got the message
that I'm not really supposed to be blind.") Among people with fewer
resources, Braille-readers tend to form the blind elite, in part because it
is more plausible for a blind person to find work doing intellectual rather
than manual labor.

A 1996 study showed that of a sample of visually impaired adults, those who
learned Braille as children were more than twice as likely to be employed as
those who had not. At the convention this statistic was frequently cited
with pride, so much so that those who didn't know Braille were sometimes
made to feel like outsiders. "There is definitely a sense of peer pressure
from the older guard," James Brown, a 35-year-old who reads using
text-to-speech software, told me. "If we could live in our own little
Braille world, then that'd be perfect," he added. "But we live in a visual
world."

When deaf people began getting cochlear implants in the late 1980s, many in
the deaf community felt betrayed. The new technology pushed people to think
of the disability in a new way - as an identity and a culture. Technology
has changed the nature of many disabilities, lifting the burdens but also
complicating people's sense of what is physically natural, because bodies
can so often be tweaked until "fixed." Arielle Silverman, a graduate student
at the convention who has been blind since birth, told me that if she had
the choice to have vision, she was not sure she would take it. Recently she
purchased a pocket-size reading machine that takes photographs of text and
then reads the words aloud, and she said she thought of vision like that, as
"just another piece of technology."

The modern history of blind people is in many ways a history of reading,
with the scope of the disability - the extent to which you are viewed as
ignorant or civilized, helpless or independent - determined largely by your
ability to access the printed word. For 150 years, Braille books were
designed to function as much as possible like print books. But now the
computer has essentially done away with the limits of form, because
information, once it has been digitized, can be conveyed through sound or
touch. For sighted people, the transition from print to digital text has
been relatively subtle, but for many blind people the shift to computerized
speech is an unwelcome and uncharted experiment. In grappling with what has
been lost, several federation members recited to me various takes on the
classic expression Scripta manent, verba volant: What is written remains,
what is spoken vanishes into air.

Rachel Aviv is a Rosalynn Carter fellow for mental-health journalism with
the Carter Center and writes frequently on education for The Times.