Hi All,

(Please excuse the duplication if you are on more than one of these
lists.)

I received the message below from another list about a professor at
Bowling Green State University who is conducting some research on
braille writing. I know that many of you are either users of braille or
you work with people who use braille, and I'm guessing that many of you
will be interested in this topic. If you know of individuals who might
be appropriate for this project, please pass along the message from Dr.
Sheri Wells-Jensen.
Thanks,
Ike

From: Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Study on Braille Writing

My colleague and I are looking for folks willing to spend about a half
hour participating in a research study on errors made in braille typing.
I am Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguist at Bowling Green State University,
who is blind and uses braille daily. I've been thinking about and
writing about braille for the past six or seven years. I'm very
interested in advancing the general understanding of braille and in
increasing braille literacy rates. My colleague, Brad Gosche, and I are
currently conducting a study examining common errors made-either on
standard braille typewriters or on computerized braille keyboards-by
adult members of the blind community who are proficient in braille
typing and typing on a standard print typewriter keyboard.  Over the
past several years, I collected 1,600 of my own "braillos" to try to see
what patterns I could discover. What we'd like to do now is include more
subjects to see what trends exist in the general population and capture
any common patterns in brailling errors. Our work does not indicate that
braille is especially difficult or harder to work with than print. We're
studying errors because errors can give clues about how people do the
things they do. Just as has been done with typing on a standard qwerty
keyboard, we will use our data to better understand braille writing and
hopefully provide some advice for learners who are struggling to learn
to write more quickly and efficiently. In order to complete the study,
we propose to conduct an analysis of 30 stimuli sentences typed by a
variety of participants at a relatively quick pace. Participants will be
provided 30 braille sentences. After having read each short sentence,
participants will be asked to type the sentence on his/her braille
keyboard at a relatively quick pace without returning to the prompt
sentence for reference and without stopping to correct any errors made
along the way. They will also be asked to type the same sentences on a
QWERTY keyboard. When I did this, it took me about a half hour to get
all the way done with both tasks. Errors made in the data collection
process may be cited in the study. However, participants' identity will
be in no way associated with it in the final paper and/or presentation.



If you're willing to lend us a hand, pleased drop me an email at
[log in to unmask] and I'll be very glad to send you the official sign-up
rhetoric prescribed by our human subjects review board. We will send you
the sentences through the mail in hard copy, attached as a text file or
whatever other way is handy for you, and you can respond either by doing
the sentences on a Perkins brailler or a braille notetaker and emailing
them back or putting them in the mail. We're flexible about how this
gets done. Thanks for considering helping us out. What I generally do is
write up braille findings for the Braille Monitor, but I can also let
participants know individually what results we find.

Best, Sheri W-J 


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