Short Wave - The Power Of Braille Literacy

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

For blind and low vision adults, the ability to read braille can be life-changing. Braille literacy is directly linked to higher rates of academic success and better employment outcomes for them. But there's a problem. The U.S. is facing a national shortage of qualified braille teachers and there's a lack of scientific research around braille overall. An interdisciplinary team led by linguist Robert Englebretson wants to change that.Read some of the team's work here:- Englebretson R, Holbrook MC, Fischer-Baum S. A position paper on researching braille in the cognitive sciences: decentering the sighted norm. Applied Psycholinguistics. 2023.- Englebretson, R., Holbrook, M.C., Treiman, R. et al. The primacy of morphology in English braille spelling: an analysis of bridging contractions. Morphology. 2024.Interested in hearing more linguistics stories? Email us at [e-mail]. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaver is Virginia Barbara here. Joined by my beloved co-host, Emily Kong. Hey, Emily. Well, thank you. Very glad to be here. I'm excited to talk to you because you've been working on a story for about a year now about how a group of researchers are studying Braille.

Yes, I've been following this group that researches Braille. Braille, as you probably know, it's a tactile writing system. That can be felt by running your finger across. embossed braille paper or braille display, which raises the dots electronically. And most people who read braille are blind or have low vision. Yeah, the raised dots electronically sounds like really, really cool. How many languages are represented by braille? There are braille systems for over 130 of the world's languages.

Wow. For music? There are braille systems for about 135 of the world's languages. There are braille systems for notating mathematics and science. science, and even hobbies like chess and knitting and crocheting. This is Robert Englebrethson. He's a linguist at Rice University. He's been blind since childhood and has always loved language and learned Braille really young. I was really quite a bookworm as a kid. And one of the cool things about Braille is that you

could sneak a book under your covers and not need a flashlight and you wouldn't get caught. Although I suspect my parents probably knew. He became a linguist, unsurprisingly, and thinks a lot about education. The CDC estimates that nearly 3% of people under 18 in the U.S. are blind or visually impaired. Wow, so that means like millions of kids and teens like Robert could be reading and writing braille. Yeah. Braille literacy is a powerful tool linked to academic success and better employment outcomes. The data around this is a little tricky, but just to illustrate what's at stake, according to the most recent American American Community Survey, less than half of working age, blind, or visually impaired people are employed.

And the majority of those employed are Braille readers. Braille allows us to read at our own pace, in our own voice. But there is a problem. What is that problem? First of all, the U.S. is facing a national shortage of qualified braille teachers. And each state has different requirements for braille literacy. So some students are getting less than an hour of instruction a week. So there's a multitude of problems all building up to a basic injustice.

Not every kid in this country is getting to read the way that Robert did. Reading is a basic human right. Literacy is a basic human right. And that is just as true for blind people as it is for sighted people. So from his corner of linguistics research, Robert hatched a plan to improve braille education. He needed more data. Like he needed to form something like the Avengers. of Braille research. So he called up a cognitive neuroscientist. My name is Simon Fisherbaum.

And a special education instructor. My name is Kay Holbrook. And they've been working together for years, meeting often to develop research plans. Yeah, I really like this story already. I mean, you have a linguist, you have cognitive neuroscientist, you have an instructor. I mean, the future is interdisciplinary work. Absolutely. And this team is a real testimony to that. They want revolutionize Braille science to improve literacy for all. So today on the show, how an interdisciplinary research team wants to challenge long-held notions about how braille is read and how it should be taught. I'm Regina Barber.

And I'm Emily Kwong. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, I'm actually super excited to hear about these Braille Avengers you talked about. So, like, tell me more about, like, what they do. Okay. Okay. So Robert, Simon, and Kay's research focuses on unified English braille. That is a writing system used in a bunch of English-speaking countries, and it's made up of cells. Each cell is essentially a two-by-three grid of possible dot configurations.

Yeah, I'm familiar with those. Yeah. And each pattern of raised dots on that two-by-three grid is unique. In some cases, the braille cell corresponds to a single letter in the English alphabet. Right. So I know that like A is a single. dot in the upper left corner. Yes, that has a name. It's called dot position one. But the thing is, Gina, once a student gets more advanced in their braille reading gets to what's called grade two level, they start learning about these special cells called contractions. Awesome. What's a contraction?

Excellent question. Okay, they're so fascinating and they make the language so dynamic. Okay, so contractions are cells representing a whole group of letters. Or sometimes even an entire word. There are about 180 braille contractions in English. One of them represents the group of letters, T-H-E. And there's nothing about the T-H-E symbol that contains a T-N-H or an E. It's like its own unique symbol. Okay, so this T-H-E contraction means the word, the, right?

It does, but it also means a whole bunch of other things. You would use it in the word then, you'd use it in the word. word therapy, you'd use it in the word brother. Anytime the sequence THE occurs in print, you would use this sequence in Braille, including in a word like strengthen. So just to compare the two, for printed readers like us, when we see the word strengthen, we can break it into two parts, right? Right, like strength and N. Yeah, the stem and the suffix. That is not at all how the word strengthen is represented in contracted Braille. It's because you use the THE contraction, it crosses the boundary between the stem strength and the

suffix EN. Those are the kinds of words that we were really interested in understanding. Does this so-called bridging morphology affect the way that people read and write Braille? So bridging morphology refers to symbols that bridge across different sounds. Mastering contractions is important to reading Braille at an advanced level, and Robert always wondered, does this bridging morphology aspect affect reading cognition? And he brought that question to The Avengers. We've got two studies out there that show that, yes, it does. So Simon Fisherbaum and I published a paper in the journal Cognition in 2016,

noting that when adult Braille readers come across words with bridge. morphology, they are slower to react to them and they make more errors than when they come across words that don't have bridge morphology. Meaning they couldn't identify the word correctly right away. Simon and Robert found that the same thing is true for children learning Braille. And this is a really good thing for teachers of the visually impaired to know. How can they use it to their advantage? Break that down for me.

Yeah. So maybe something important to understand about teachers of the visually impaired is that most of them are cited. Here's Kay. Most learn Braille after they already know how to read and write. And that's a very, very different situation than children who are learning to read and write through Braille. On top of that, remember, there's a national shortage of qualified Braille teachers. Right.

Kay Holberg is the third member of this research team. She's the teacher. Yeah. And she wants to just raise the bar on braille instruction for everyone. Our goal is to have every student who is going to be a braille reader to have direct, ongoing, and consistent instruction by a qualified teacher with a visually impaired. Which means really advancing how braille reading and writing is taught. I'm not going to get into all of the nuances of the things that this team wants to see. It's actually very complicated. But one thing I want you to take away is this idea that braille is a fundamentally different writing system.

It is not a code for English. In fact, Simon, Robert, and Kay have just started working on a new project about how braille comprehension shows up in the brain, the neural correlates of it. And it might be different, they hypothesize, than people who read print. You know, I've seen articles that start out, Braille allows blind people to read print. And I go, no, it doesn't. Braille allows blind people to read. Braille is literacy.

Braille is a writing system equal to print. parallel to print, and not dependent on print. I was part of the problem with this because me and other people started calling it a code to differentiate it from a language. But working with Robert and Simon has really enlightened me to the problems with calling it a code.

They further argue it's problematic to compare Braille readers to cited, readers at all. For example, one of the classic ways to measure reading skill with print reading is speed. Right. Like, I'm a very slow reader. And, like, I've always made me really sad that I can't read, like, so many words per minute, right, that other people can. It's perhaps not even relevant to Braille readers is what Simon was explaining to me, our neuroscientist. He said, look, you know, cited readers can see a word all at once, whereas braille readers encounter a word bit by bit as their hand moves across the page, they take an information through their fingers.

Maybe overall people who read Braille are going to be slower at reading Braille, but it has nothing to do with how good they are at reading. The assumption that words per minute is the right way to measure how good you are at reading is a site-centric norm. I mean, there's so many ways to measure wizardry with words, with writing, with reading. There's like comprehension. Like, yeah, are you actually understanding what you're reading? Yeah, there's like spelling, proofreading, reading charts and graphs. Actually, I met a high school student who wants to be a software engineer and attributes his career path to learning braille at a very young age. His name is Caden Johnson, and he's based in Canada.

There's things that I can do a lot faster in Braille than I can with using something like voiceover. I want to be a software engineer, and I would probably use a screenwriter mostly for that. But I could also integrate Braille using something like a braille display. so I can read what's on the screen in Braille, which might be quicker than listening. That's so cool. Yeah, and that's why the focus of the Braille Avengers is ultimately on education, right? It's on hiring and training the next generation of teachers and defending the place of Braille and education at all.

Here's kind of the leader of the team, Robert Englebretson again. I think there's some misconceptions out there that Braille is obsolete, that we should all just switch over to text to speech, screen readers, audiobooks and that kind of thing. And I would just say that until cited readers do the same and until people stop reading print, why would we ask blind people to do that instead of reading Braille? I mean, like, it's true, you know, like, we shouldn't have to just depend on electronics. Has any of the team's research led to, like, policy recommendations for teachers or schools or parents? I think that's where they ultimately want to go. But Robert told me that they are

a long way off from that. They want to do much more detailed research using interventions from students and teachers first. Simon says, actually, he and the team have been hosting workshops for teachers of the visually impaired. And they're just kind of talking to teachers and gathering a long list of questions to inspire their research. Emily, thank you so much for bringing this reporting. It's made me think about language and how I read. But I want to hear more about the story if there's, you know, any updates in the future about, like, getting more people to teach Braille. Yeah, I'll let you know the whole Braille Avengers team.

They're so determined. And I'm really glad we could have them on the show. Yeah, I'm excited. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by a showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Rebecca and Emily checked the facts. Quasi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.

I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.