vancouver sun
Monica Nelson is learning to read. It is her first day of lessons and these
are the letters she has learned: a . . .b . . . c . . . d . . . e. She
combines these and reads a few simple words.
It is easier than she thought, she says with a smile that animates her face
and engages her eyes.
Her eyes are why she's here, at age 41, in the program for visually
impaired adults at Vancouver Community College.
Her eyes smile, but they no longer see. And so she has travelled from
Surrey, 90 minutes by public transit, to learn braille.
In this classroom - surrounded by books on tape, print magnifiers, talking
computers and other miracle technology for those without sight - the notion
seems almost quaint.
Her fingertips run softly over the page, trying to read the bumps and
spaces of the elaborate code of raised dots invented in 1829 by Louis
Braille.
For most Canadians who are blind or visually impaired, braille is a lost
skill - a language in decline, in the way that Latin died on school
curriculums or Morse Code was rendered obsolete.
The trend is viewed with alarm by the Canadian National Institute for the
Blind (CNIB) and other advocacy groups. They have discovered a paradox:
the
technology that is making the world an easier and more inclusive place for
people who are blind is also creating a population of the functionally
illiterate.
There are none so blind, they say, as those who cannot read.
Talking books, computers that respond to voice command or speak text
through voice synthesizers, fail to instill the fundamentals of reading and
writing, many educators say.
Of 739 students registered with B.C.'s Resource Centre for the Visually
Impaired, just 130 of the kindergarten to Grade 12 students are braille
users, about one in six. Twenty years ago, the number of braille-using
students was more than one in three.
Fewer than 10 per cent of the  14,000 British Columbians and almost
100,000
Canadians who are blind or visually impaired are braille readers, estimates
Lori Sheppard of New Westminster, who is national coordinator for Canada's
first Braille Day, Feb. 9.
Braille Day - sponsored by the CNIB, the Canadian Braille Authority and the
federal literacy secretariate among others - is an attempt to retake the
ground braille lost to flashier, easier technologies.
It will be marked on Parliament Hill and in learning centres across Canada,
and sold on braille's ability to deliver employment and equality to the
community of the blind.
If computers have not replaced the need to teach reading and writing to
students with sight, why should technology replace braille for those who
are visually impaired, advocates ask.
"Not all people who are blind believe that braille is important," concedes
Mary Anne Epp, an administrator at Langara College and president of the
advocacy group Canadian Braille Authority.
She cites statistics claiming that more than 90 per cent of adults who are
fluent in braille are employed. "If they don't have braille, only 25 per
cent are employed."
In the case of Sheppard, braille not only made her employable, it became
her product.
Until she lost her sight in a car accident 10 years ago, "I had no
knowledge of blindness." She was 26 and a liquor store clerk. What followed
was a crash course through the CNIB: learning how to use a white cane,
pairing with a guide dog, cooking, matching her wardrobe, reading braille,
using computers.
Today, her business, PAWS - Public Awareness Without Sight - provides
braille menus to about 40 restaurants, including White Spot, Red Robin and
Boston Pizza outlets. She also conducts "public awareness training" for
such clients as hotels, moving from appointment to appointment with her
guide dog Brynda.
It was computers that first drew Monica Nelson to Vancouver Community
College. Her husband and two sons are computer junkies and she is
determined to keep up.
Talking computers and voice-command software have opened the Internet for
those without sight, allowing access to Internet editions of newspapers and
magazines, to chat groups or academic studies. Books can be scanned and
converted to voice, or even "printed" on a braille embosser.
Nelson saw her blindness coming. It had deteriorated over a decade as
retinitis pigmentosa degenerated the light-sensitive retinas of both eyes.
It was not like a curtain closing, she explains, but a fog that stole in
silently from the edges, constricting her field of vision, robbing detail,
stealing light.
She was advised years ago not to bother with braille while she still had
her sight. It might have been easier to learn as a younger woman, she
concedes. Now, however, she has the motivation.
"I think it will be a benefit," she says.
"You can't carry a computer with you all the time or a tape recorder, or
whatever. And a tape recorder isn't going to help me see which is the can
of tomato soup and which is the can of cream of mushroom."
Gwen Masse, an instructor in the program, says students like Nelson should
have been encouraged to study braille years earlier.
Once their sight fades, they often find the limits of technology, she says.
Masse began her teaching career in the 1960s at Vancouver's former Jericho
Hill School for the Deaf and Blind.
For all the flaws of such residential schools - Jericho closed to the blind
in 1978 and students have since been integrated with mixed success into
regular classes - they provided a powerful grounding in braille, says
Masse.
"As print is to a print reader, braille is to a braille reader. It's their
print," she says. "To be a literate person you need to be able to read
braille."
This opinion is not shared by all who are visually impaired.
Paul Thiele has 10 per cent vision. He has two university degrees and is an
adviser and one of the founders of the Crane Resource Centre at the
University of B.C. He does not read braille. But, he says, "I sure as hell
am not illiterate."
In some respects, braille's fortunes can be traced through the Crane
centre, which began in 1968 with the donation of thousands of braille books
from the personal library of the late Charles Crane, who was both deaf and
blind.
Today, the centre has an extensive computer lab, as well as recorded and
braille books. It is the central resource for students and faculty who are
visually impaired or who have other disabilities that make print books
impossible to use.
The centre still lends and produces braille books, but Thiele estimates
they now represent just 10 to 15 per cent of the collection. There is far
more reliance on talking books, recorded in its basement studios by a
dedicated army of volunteer readers.
Braille doesn't work for some people, particularly the growing body of
older people who lose their sight and have difficulty starting over with a
new language, Thiele says.
As well, such diseases as diabetes, which can cause blindness, may leave
fingers less sensitive to touch.
"I'm all for teaching it," he says of braille. "But there are some real
limitations and it is only one of the many languages or alphabets or
methodologies that are available."
Yet braille, for all of its challenges and complexities, is a remarkably
versatile language. The combinations of up to six dots in a braille "cell"
can represent the letters of the alphabet, numbers, equations, even music
notation.
It need not be used to the exclusion of other technologies.
Shruti Shravah, 11, is learning to read. She is learning to write, to do
geometry and all the other things that her fellow students do in Grade 6 at
Vancouver's Sir Alex Mackenzie school.
Her sight has failed to the point where she sees only vague shapes and
colours. Yet, she runs everywhere, her white cane in one hand, a small
computer, known as Braille Lite, slung on a strap over one shoulder.
She studies math in braille - her textbook, translated into dots, is 22
volumes. She plays chess in braille. She reads voraciously in braille -
sometimes at night, in the dark, when she really should be sleeping.
Today, she is in the library with Vancouver resource teacher Michael
Mizera, one of 53 full or part-time itinerant teachers in B.C. who travel
to schools to assist students who are visually impaired.
He is helping Shruti edit a letter she has written to a friend she met last
summer at a literacy camp for children who are visually impaired.
"Dear Ria," it begins, "How are you?" Shruti usually writes Grade 2 level
braille, an advanced form using many contractions. Her friend's braille
comprehension, however, is rudimentary.
Still, the letter is chatty and accomplished. She wrote it on her Braille
Lite, her little screenless computer. She uses it to take notes in class,
punching the six keys that create the infinite combinations of braille.
It is a remarkable machine.
She can play back her letter, or school notes, by listening to a computer
generated voice. Or she can run her fingers over its "refreshable braille"
board. That is a line of mechanical braille cells. The dots raise and
lower, as she scrolls line by line through her letter. She feels the words
she has written.
Shruti rushes back to her classroom just before lunch and plugs Braille
Lite into one of two printers. One can print the letter on a braille
embosser, the second rattles it off in standard English.
She hands the printed English version to a visitor not realizing she is
holding it upside down and backwards. To her it is just paper.
The real version -  the one she can read in the dark; the one that lets her
run with the other 11 year olds at Mackenzie school; the one that has her
thinking she might be a doctor one day - that one is covered with dots.
Louis Braille's little miracle. Monica Nelson's challenge. Shruti Shravah's
future. "Have you learned braille yet," she writes her friend, a little
impatiently.


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